
Ask HN: What open source projects do you wish existed? - jrpt
What sort of open source projects do you wish existed, but don&#x27;t currently exist or aren&#x27;t being done very well?
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kaolinite
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.

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snowpanda
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.

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mrfusion
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.

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jszymborski
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.

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orionblastar
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.

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jabv
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.

~~~
orionblastar
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.

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

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trcollinson
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.

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jfaucett
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.

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

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

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akhilpo
Fully open FPGAs including the synthesis tools.

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based2
a centralized gps traffic (a public tom-tom)

an alternative to open design alliance CAD DWG Autocad

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curiousjorge
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.

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tocs
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.

~~~
curiousjorge
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.

