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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?

makeasnek , (edited )
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

I would give it all to BOINC !boinc. 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.

kool_newt ,

Ah I used to do one that searched for Mersenne Primes. Installing BOINC now.

xkforce ,

Proton/WINE. I never want to have issues playing games without windows ever again.

ripe_banana ,
@ripe_banana@lemmy.world avatar

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).

syl ,

I think signal is really only missing usernames (which should come soon) as far as features are concerned. And sadly, I don’t think it will change much. I think signals problem is not really feature wise but adoption wise.

Signal needs more marketing. It needs a bigger user base. And I honestly don’t know how to change that. Maybe some really top notch marketing strategy, with beautiful diagrams and text of some made up scenarios explaining the perils of using Instagram and whatsapp…

ripe_banana ,
@ripe_banana@lemmy.world avatar

I think you’re right?

I also think they’re on the right track (and a better track than apps like telegram - lots of negative social baggage). They really have gotten much farther than any other privacy focused apps.

I don’t know, maybe I have a more optimistic view of the situation. It feel like they’re knocking on the door of going fully mainstream.

syl ,

Really? I feel like they have worsen their numbers after disabling sms support. I had a few people with whom I could chat on signal. They all moved away. I now have 0 ppl. I still have it installed but ya…

dom ,

I moved away from signal and so did a number of people I knew. Because sms stopped working

ripe_banana ,
@ripe_banana@lemmy.world avatar

Ya, looked into it and I’m wrong. I still think there is potential but…

Telegram is way bigger than I thought. Its bigger than snapchat. 😯

starman OP , (edited )
@starman@programming.dev avatar

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
a_seattle_ian , (edited )

What about Mono? Looks like most of the people working on .NET are working out of Redmond at Microsoft.

souperk ,
@souperk@reddthat.com avatar

I know microsoft bad

I second that, big corp bad

kill_dash_nine ,

Kubernetes so that it can peak already and then die off.

Disclaimer - I make a living on k8s based solutions and I’m over the stupid complexity for little benefit. It’s like expecting everyone to be a “10x” engineer or some shit when reality is that most of us are just over here sniffing glue.

railsdev ,

I make a living on the same, and feel exactly the same. Outside of work I go for platforms that abstract away all the annoying shit.

PS: Are you my coworker?

corbin ,

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.

franzfurdinand ,
@franzfurdinand@lemmy.world avatar

ReactOS is one I haven’t heard about in quite a few years. That one would be really cool to see get a lot more dev time.

fred ,

API parity for Firefox meaning, implement Chrome’s proprietary crap, or are they actually lagging on web standards? Last time I checked was admittedly a while ago but I thought ff was the leader for standards compliance.

corbin ,

There are some useful APIs that Firefox is missing compared to Chromium, like Web Share or Web Bluetooth: caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+117,firefox+117&c…

ExLisper ,

Some sort of new standarized runtime that would replace the clasterfuck of HTML, http, js and CSS. All privacy oriented, secure and open source.

starman OP ,
@starman@programming.dev avatar

That would be nice. Maybe it could integrate with WASM

mindbleach ,

Adoption is a feature you can’t design.

Iamdanno ,

An actually really good Linux CAD program.

SnipingNinja ,

Yes please! While we’re at it, non subscription beginner friendly cad program

the_lone_wolf ,
@the_lone_wolf@lemmy.ml avatar
  • 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.
angstylittlecatboy , (edited )

(I explain and link to the ones that I don’t think everyone here would know about)

  • Lemmy
  • ActivityPub
  • Firefox (Chromium should go the way of IE)
  • Godot
  • WINE
  • Cinnamon (the desktop environment developed for Linux Mint, so we can get Wayland support)
  • Box86/Box64
  • 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)
  • 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)
  • 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)
raven ,

Re: haiku what do you find so promising about it? I’ve played around with it. I imagine it isn’t just the desktop experience?

angstylittlecatboy , (edited )

To be clear, “part of me” is really doing a lot of work here.

Haiku feels more “rigid.” GNU/Linux is ultimately, a pile of parts instead of a cohesive whole, and it shows in the user experience even in distros made with user friendliness in mind. GNU/Linux’s modularity is a good thing for many uses, but it also makes GNU/Linux feel incoherent to use at times and just means the Linux ecosystem will always be fragmented. FreeBSD has the rigidity, but isn’t developed with average end users in mind and is particularly unusable as a gaming OS. Currently Haiku isn’t really usable for much of anything, but Haiku’s vision of a cohesive open source OS that is designed with a laser focus on personal computing users makes sense and I could see being recommended over Linux if it were achieved (though, I don’t believe Haiku in the real world where we can’t just fast forward development ten years can achieve this.)

SnipingNinja ,

Is chromium bad by itself or is it bad because Google controls it? Because then maybe we should get chromium out of Google’s control instead?

Emanuel ,

Thanks for introducing me to Darling.

juliebean ,

Coreboot, NixOS, Firefox, Lemmy, Briar, Gemini, Calibre, Godot, MIRI (though admittedly that one is maybe less of a 'software project per se, so if that doesn’t count i’ll say 100 Rabbits just cause i think their stuff is neat) and i think i’ll take the last decade for my own personal project(s).

mattyeen ,
@mattyeen@pawb.social avatar
spauldo ,

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.

ryannathans ,

Has anyone tried to build an open source sims?

We’re working on open source 2009 runescape revisions. 2009scape.org and !2009scape

Other eras discussed in !runescape

spauldo ,

Not to my knowledge, but I’ve been away from gaming for a while.

mindbleach ,

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.

9488fcea02a9 ,

Whatever underfunded, underappreciated project this xkcd is referring to: xkcd.com/2347

Imagemagick? GNU privacy guard? OpenSSL?

SnipingNinja ,

The alt text mentions ImageMagick

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