If you could give 10 years of development time to up to 10 software projects, which would you choose?
If you could give 10 years of development time to up to 10 software projects, which would you choose?
- You can choose up to 10 software projects.
- Each project receives 10 years of development time as if all the programmers worked continuously for that duration, following their current working methods.
- After choosing these 10 (or less) projects, everything else remains unchanged in the world, as if time has been frozen for 10 years.
Which projects do you choose?
I would give it all to BOINC !boinc@sopuli.xyz. I donate time and money to this project on a regular basis, but I wish more people knew about BOINC because projects like this give me faith in humanity. BOINC is a open source tool scientists can use to distribute massive computational workloads to the computers of volunteers. Any scientist can use it without institutional backing or approval, it's an open network operating on the petaflop scale. Users can choose which projects they compute for.
BOINC has been used for medical research, finding new asteroids, and identifying new particles at the Large Hadron Collider. Anybody remember seti@home? Ran on BOINC. BOINC was also used to make the first accurate 3D model of the sars-cov-2 spike protein and even helped lead to the design of a shelf-stable vaccine which was distributed to millions. Plus, the project Minecraft@home used it to find the tallest cactus. BOINC has resulted in hundreds of scientific papers that without BOINC would never have gotten funded due to the cost and complexity of the computation involved.
But there is some serious technical debt and usability issues and BOINC has a long-term trend of declining userbase.
Proton/WINE. I never want to have issues playing games without windows ever again.
Signal: Because I want better messaging, and somehow they already achieved some adoption.
Firefox: If Firefox can somehow make their browser miles ahead of chrome, I think that'd be just plain good for the world.
Gitea/Forgejo: I think Github is another one of these centralized platforms that's pretty ripe for disruption (and gitlab is just not gonna do it).
Lemmy: It'd be amazing to have all the kinks ironed out of lemmy.
Mastodon: Same thing as lemmy. Get social media out of the hands of big companies.
Mail-in-a-box: I want to be able to host my own email if I want to. Proton is great, but isn't email supposed to be an open standard?
Framework: Not exactly a software project, but man I'd love to see them get the time to push out a ton of great different products and really spark the right to repair movement. It's the first device I was actually excited to buy.
Linux Mint: I don't use mint, but it seems like one of the most user friendly distros. I would love for them to make everything perfect and create a seamless experience (and really make a year of the linux desktop). I also think it would be great to just have one clear frontrunner for new users.
Coreboot: Make firmware open source? Yes please.
Truly Open Source LLM: I really don't want this tech to be in just the hands of just a big company. I'd love for there to be an LLM that has not only it's weights open, but the full dataset, training methods and everything open.
I think when you just get 10 years of dev time, you get an opportunity to push a project ahead of all it's competitors. It is kind of interesting to get to pick and choose a project to be the frontrunner (even if they aren't currently).
For me it would be:
- Helix: Great editor but needs a lot of development
- Lemmy: 3rd party frontends would have a hard time to catch up with changes, but it's worth it anyway
- GNU: they could update some stuff and also hurd kernel looks really interesting
- Arch Linux: maybe they would improve wiki or write some software to make life easier on arch
- .NET: I know that microsoft bad but I really like .NET, and it's devs are doing really nice stuff. And it's FOSS
- LibreOffice: they could integrate LLMs into their apps maybe
- Wayland: why not?
- Firefox: maybe they will improve performance and catch up with some css features
- Hyprland: it's working fine at it's current state, but it always can be better
- Nouveau: it would be a nice alternative to proprietary nvidia drivers
If I’m thinking about projects that could benefit the most from an exponential increase in active developers:
- Wine/Proton (could have a fantastic windows runtime on every *nix platform)
- ReactOS (lot of potential for a windows 7/10 upgrade path)
- Mozilla Firefox (would help with API parity with chromium)
- GIMP (but only if they agree to change the stupid name)
The rest goes to package managers and other lower-level projects that don’t get enough of a spotlight, maybe Brew or Curl or something.
- AOSP(Android open source project)
- Linux
- designing one low level emulator
- making my own game engine
- reverse engineering and source code recovery of my childhood games.
- writing firmware for my personal laptop and phone so, it runs on fully on open source code.
- writing my own compiler and JIT runtime.
- making my own Standard C Lib.
- write my own minimal Desktop environment based on wayland without using graphics library like QT and GTK.
- i also want to write my own hypervisor.
(I explain and link to the ones that I don't think everyone here would know about)
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Lemmy
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ActivityPub
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Firefox (Chromium should go the way of IE)
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Godot
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WINE
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Cinnamon (the desktop environment developed for Linux Mint, so we can get Wayland support)
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Box86/Box64
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Darling (macOS compatibility layer for Linux, plans to support running iOS apps when running on on ARM machines in the future, I want this primarily for iOS preservation purposes)
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Xemu (Original Xbox emulator, OG Xboxes are some of the most failure prone consoles and a game I want to play still has serious issues)
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Haiku (mostly for really nerdy shits and giggles honestly, but there's a part of me that thinks it could be a better consumer grade FOSS OS than GNU/Linux if it were more developed and had any actual software support. As it stands, like it's proprietary predecessor BeOS, it's just a toy. It's no less stupid than investing your theoretical time in Hurd IMO)
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I've got a few that are similar to other posts in here, but what I'd really like is an open source game similar to The Sims. Specifically, one that tries to achieve the goals of Sims 3.
Sims 3 could have been an amazing game, but EA half-assed it making mediocre content and not fixing bugs.
If the game was open source, all those bugs would be fixed, the game would be optimized, and it would still be relevant today. But while open source is great for maintaining and improving big software projects, it's not good for creating them in the first place. So that's where I'd put ten years of development - creating an open source life simulation game.
Whatever underfunded, underappreciated project this xkcd is referring to: https://xkcd.com/2347
Imagemagick? GNU privacy guard? OpenSSL?
I'd use it to kill platforms.
HTML5 is a fine executable format. Electron sucks because it bundles a browser with each webpage. The technical hurdles are smaller than the mountain of usability issues we'll have to sand down, to make "web apps" Just Work. Native apps will always be better, but we've accidentally done a Java with write-once-run-everywhere, and it's ridiculous how poorly we've used that.
On the back end, we have nearly-invisible translation layers like WINE and fairly efficient emulators like BOCHS, so there's no reason Windows apps shouldn't run on everything. x86, ARM, RISC-V, whatever.
SPIR-V should already let you treat the GPU like a zillion-core CPU. Nvidia's CUDA bullshit has gone on too long.
And then drop in some not-quite-emulators for consoles, since they're just PCs anyway. End the charade.
- Godot Engine
- OnlyOffice
- Appflowy
- Affine.pro
- Debian
- Forgejo/Gittea
- Blender
- Linux Mint
- Postgresql
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MorphOS (as someone who is a fan of Amiga)
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SuperTux Advance (much better than plain old SuperTux in my opinion)
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Even though I'll probably never end up even starting it, I'd love to see my idea for an open source clone of Vib Ribbon for PC to happen (game name under debate)
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Krosmaga (I love this card game and would love to see new cards or even new deity classes to play as like Pandawa or Osamados)
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Steam Proton (just to see a much higher percentage of Steam games work on Linux/SteamOS if possible)
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Baldur's Gate 4 through 13.
- KDE Project
- Wayland
- Open source drivers (especially Nvidia)
- Lemmy
- Mastadon
- Scribus
- Nextcloud
- Firefox
- Tutanota suite
- Wine
Nextcloud and nc integration apps. The integration to android ls so much further behind the windows desktop / web experience, using nc in a browser on android is often better than the app (due to lack of features, not because of bugs those are fine in my experiance)
- Mesa
- Noveau
- Wine
- Proton
- RedoxOS
- GNU Hurd
- KDE Plasma
- Kdenlive
- LibreOffice
- Nushell
Edit: There are even more projects that need some development like Linux, Wayland and some BSDs
llama.cpp
Matrix chat
the Fediverse
and some self-hosting framework
(and maybe just for shits and giggles to buttplug.io just to see what amazing thing this will become)
Honestly, there's a lot of great answers in this thread. Personally, I'd love to see a FOSS ttrpg manager. Talking a complete library of monsters, races, classes, etc., along with an optimized pipeline for homebrewed stuff. Tools for encounter, battlemap, NPC and campaign flow creation.
Closest thing is 5e Companion App but it doesn't have a PC client, isn't FOSS, has a lot of weird limitations and UX/UI issues (like multiclassing could be simpler, and its really frustrating that you can't level down a character after all the work you did, forcing you to do it all over again just to change classes and spells). Also DnD next but getting source books for a whole player session is expensive.
If I truly had this power, I'd somehow get far more engineers on ReactOS then use all 10 uses on ReactOS. ReactOS is honestly the thing that is going to replace Windows if anything does. Linux is just too different and not user-friendly. People can argue it is now or it's growing that way but realistically the underlying Linux ethos is that "you should know your computer." Ain't no one wants to know their computer. They just want to use it. ReactOS is just 50 years behind Windows at this point.
Lemmy, Firefox, Proton/wine, KDE, GNOME, Wayland
Blender, FreeCAD and Godot! Amazing pieces of software, that I can't wait to see what develop into.
- Linux
Obviously
- Wayland
So we can finally say goodnight to X
- XFCE
For low-end devices and people who don't like bloat, we can still have a modern desktop.
- Nouveau / NVK
Nvidia are currently dominant, so new users probably have Nvidia GPUs.
- Open-source AMDGPU stack.
Why not? I'm only five items in.
- Blender
I want fast fluid simulations and RTGI in eevee.
DarkTable
GIMP
KDE
Kdenlive
I'd throw all the development time into EMACS. It's a great operating system, but lacks a good text editor.
Whatever enables me to boot different OSs from my phone or arm devices including dual booting and booting from external storage without missing drivers
Linux, Wayland, Firefox, kde, proton, Pipewire.
Nobara, kden live, free cad, only office.
Firefly iii
Nextcloud
And 8 others
GNOME Calendar, Lemmy, Thunderbird, Firefox
A game engine designed around efficiency so that developers can focus on mechanics, graphics, etc
Edit: alternatively a reverse engineering AI which can reverse engineer anything from isa to video games and more
Proton wrapper Gadot or similar Cura slicer Linux mint Kenshi 2 New stalker AMD Drivers
10 years of development is insane, and I feel like some projects will be limited by the hardware and other software that isn't being updated. You'd have to spread out the 10 amongst projects that can help each other.
Would this also depend on who is currently working on it, or would the project also get a stable number of developers working full time?
- Jellyfin
- Proton (mail/etc.)
- Cinnamon DE
- Actual Budget
- A project that lets you access your financial data from all your US banks programmatically
- Tandoor
- Immich
- A crypto that combines XNO and XMR
- Rhasspy
- Home Assistant
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, x10