Ask HN: What open source projects do you wish existed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What open source projects do you wish existed?

26 pointsjrpt19 comments

What sort of open source projects do you wish existed, but don't currently exist or aren't being done very well?

I would love an open-source Heroku. Yeah there's OpenStack, Dokku, etc - but they're nowhere near as easy to use as Heroku (not knocking them, by the way, they have a place and are great projects). Presumably such an application would run on a server of its own and you would give it an API key for DigitalOcean, Linode, etc, and then push your repos to it as you do with Heroku. Massive undertaking, of course.

Something else I'd love to see is a server that's as easy as an iPad. Sandstorm is doing some work in this area, although I'm not convinced that the end result will be great. I want a server I can connect to, install apps from an app store as easily as on an iPad, configure as easily as an iPad, etc. Linux/FreeBSD/etc will always be needed for high performance websites and intensive or innovative computing needs but 95% of people just want to host a website or some email. I should be able to log on, go to the App Store, download the Minecraft server and be playing my game within minutes (with a nice GUI for configuration). Don't believe this is needed? The existence of SaaS is proof that it is - software is too hard and too complicated to install, configure and keep updated on your own server.

I would love to see an open-source operating system that supports Windows applications. Although I understand the size of this project would be enormous.

ReactOS is still far behind, although what they have accomplished so far is amazing.

Also an open-source virus scanner would be nice (besides ClamAV which if I recall correctly doesn't support real-time scanning).

And I would love to see an alternative to Android and iOS take off into the mainstream.

State of the art Ocr, also voice recognition. Hardware wise an bipedal robot like the one from Boston dynamics, also a really good robotic arm.

Tesseract's OCR is pretty solid, but I cannot agree more, open-source voice recognition and synthesis is nowhere near the sort of thing Google, Microsoft or Nuance can match.

I'm trying to make business apps and legal practice management apps. Most of them don't exist as open source projects or free software. I'd like to see someone make an attempt at making them.

I think after seeing how Microsoft has a big lock in with businesses offering FOSS solutions for like Linux or OSX would help some migrate away from Windows. Most Business and Legal apps are Windows only and commercial.

Could you give some examples of the closed-source apps you're looking to compete against? So much work in most businesses is done in Office (incl. Outlook and Access, maybe Project), but obviously decent FOSS alternatives already exist for those apps.

I can't copy their UI or their database.

But there was an app called CMSOpen and was bought out and called Solution Six. I can't find their website and the company has been bought and sold many times. I don't know what it is called now, but a lot of law firms used it and it was designed by accountants. I worked for a law firm and we modified the database so it was faster and worked better. I wrote some ASP web apps to use their database and I think the law firm licensed them. I got too sick to work in 2001 and was fired. But I have 4 and a half years of knowledge of working on such an app.

The problem is that it uses Office and MS-SQL Server, and even needs Sharepoint server. It is so tied to Windows and Microsoft technology that it costs a lot to use and smaller law firms cannot afford it.

But the main thing with any law firm is billing time to a client and matter number on a timesheet and searching for database records based on client name and number and matter name and number. As well as billing attorney and other stuff.

Open source versions of GMail, Google Calendar and Google Apps.

I would assume you mean the interfaces for these, or something somewhat similar, that could be self hosted. Suddenly I wonder how hard that would really be. I bet if the initial developers could get past the hump of early adoption then it wouldn't be too hard to get the community to add the feature they want.

This might be a really fun open source project to start. Hmmm.

An encrypted email server thats as easy to setup as apt-get install. Managing your own email is still a huge headache, and it really shouldn't be this bad in 2015. I'm talking some service with a reasonable config file format (json?), and high quality built-in anti-spam utils, so you don't have to deal with that. Ideally, it would take the Elasticsearch route and make everything manageable over a REST-API so anyone could build clients for it. I really wish this existed.

A REPL for node with bpython's features; something that lets people collaboratively share and tag their GitHub stars, offers recommendations, etc.

Fully open decent GPU. The Novena laptop is open hardware except for this part IIRC. No need for latest-fps-class GPU.

Fully open FPGAs including the synthesis tools.

a centralized gps traffic (a public tom-tom)

an alternative to open design alliance CAD DWG Autocad

What would be the point of open sourcing your hard work? I'm sorry but I don't believe that you should solve by giving it away for free, how,does that benefit you? I'm genuinely curious to know if any of you have gained a real business value by open sourcing.

However, I do believe in open source if the soul purpose was to open source to begin with, just as long as people aren't naively jumping on the bandwagon after failing to gain traction or sales.

Perhaps a little too black and the white thinking above but in my own experience, open sourcing your product seems to attract freeloaders, your conversion falls, someone that would have gladly paid walks, leaving money on the table.

Some people aren't in it for the money.

And even those who are, there's plenty of successful consultancies based around open source software.

Your comment is literally irrelevant to OP's question.

A company providing a service might turn to open source a software project if they do not want to turn into a software company. If I understand correctly MySQL AB was a company that developed an open source DB but made money selling support and training (and also sold a non open version of MySQL). The company later sold for $1 billion, so there must have been some benefit.

Interesting, is it fair to say that for enterprise customers, the bulk of the cost comes in the form of support & training?

I've seen a CRM company that sold their software for 100k/year but the actual software license is only like 20% or less and the remaining 80% was training and support.

So in this case letting go the license fee in return for marketing to adopters who now will turn to you for help.

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