Is there some project that the opensource world is missing that you think it needs?
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Nothing and everything.
There are thousands if not millions of open source solutions scattered around society. Some are feature complete, most are not. Some are maintained, many are not. A handful are funded, the rest is not.
What open source needs, more than anything else is fundraising and the means to distribute those funds to the tune of the trillions of dollars that the corporate world extracts in profits from those open source efforts.
In other words, the people who make this need to get paid.
Firefox terms and conditions, Red Hat, and several other projects that have caused uproar through the community, are all caused by the need to get paid to eat food and have a roof over your head whilst you contribute to society and give away your efforts.
Google earth
I’ve been wanting to try to leave Windows for Linux, but I just can’t find a replacement for AutoHotkey that can do everything that it can. It would have to be some kind of weird combination of various Python libraries, AutoKey, and Espanso, and even then it’s either not as easy or downright convoluted at best.
I also can’t find any FOSS image editor that can do this.
for me the most critical ones are replacements for discord and microsoft teams. for discord the critical piece is the login - people don’t want to make accounts on each server, so until we have proper federation with a good user experience people won’t actually move off it.
for teams i’m sure theres projects in development, i just don’t know them or their status - all i know is that i want a project to combine several specialized FOSS services (jitsi is great, and there’s lots of other collaboration tools for email/calendar/chat) into one nice unified frontend that is actually reasonably easy to self-host and maintain.
https://meet.jit.si/ was a contender during the covid era
Open source language learning only has Anki. Everything else is in an enbryonic stage.
There are so many low hanging fruits. Add-on to look up words in subtitles and add it to Anki. Luo dingo clone that’s a bit less tedious (without having to write so much of your native language). Clozemaster clone (unless someone knows how to set up Anki to do this)
forget me not, i think on f-droid may be an option. it’s fairly easy to make data files for, and you could easily ask your favourite llm to wrap some data into the format.
The EU managed to get Meta on their knees with GDPR. They could force unlocked bootloader and easy install of any OS on phones just like on laptop/pc. I believe then we would really get the Linux phone movement going. Imagine: iPhone with UBports.
At the minute, a true open source and free browser/web engine, though I know this is nigh impossible to maintain without thousands of people. Some part of me is hopeful though given recent events.
https://ladybird.org/ is pretty cool, tho it definitely needs more work
This is niche, but I really want a good FOSS screenwriting software that can rival Highland. There are some options like Trelby and others (because the Fountain syntax makes interchangeable screenplay files possible) but right now none of them are as good as Highland. A good alternative could let me finally leave Apple
If you really wanted to leave the Apple eco-system, it would most likely be possible to run macos in an emulator (kvm/qemu) on a pc and most likely the software too.
Tax software. It’s the only reason I keep a windows VM.
I considered an accounting SaaS once. Only once though. The amount of constantly changing regulations would make it a very high maintenance project.
games! in maybe 95% of cases you can find an open alternative to some (non-game) software, but with games it’s the opposite.
i would say that the main proprietary softwares i still use, are video games
Disclaimer: I have no qualifications or really any business talking about this…
I think games aren’t the best kind of projects for open source. Some games are made open source after development ends which is cool because it opens up forks and modding (pixel dungeon did this). Most games require a single, unified, creative vision which is hard to get from an “anyone can help” contribution style. Most open source software are tools for doing specific things. It’s almost objective what needs to be done to improve the software while games are much more opinionated and fuzzy. So many times I’ve seen a game’s community rally behind a suggestion to address a problem and the developer ignores them and implements a better idea to more elegantly solve it. Most people aren’t game designers but they feel like they could be.
An exception to this are certain, rules-based puzzly games. Bit-Burner is an open source hacking game with relatively simple mechanics and it works well.
A project to give me money in exchange for me writing software.
Leadership: What is important, what redundant projects should be joined or axed and their developers merged.
Ahh yes, consolidation and centralization, core pillars of the FOSS movement.
Maybe it should be.
