Slashdot Mirror

ArgoUML

ArgoUML is the leading open source UML modeling tool and includes support for all standard UML 1.4 diagrams. It runs on any Java platform and is available in ten languages. See the feature list for more details.

Bongo

The Bongo Project is creating fun and simple mail, calendaring and contacts software: on top of a standards-based server stack; we're innovating fresh and interesting web user interfaces for managing personal communications. Bongo is providing an entirely free software solution which is less concerned with the corporate mail scenario and much more focused on how people want to organize their lives.

Boost

Boost provides free peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries.

Boost emphasizes libraries that work well with the C++ Standard Library. Boost libraries are intended to be widely useful, and usable across a broad spectrum of applications. The Boost license encourages both commercial and non-commercial use.

Boost aims to establish “existing practice” and provide reference implementations so that Boost libraries are suitable for eventual standardization. Ten Boost libraries are already included in the C++ Standards Committee's Library Technical Report (TR1) as a step toward becoming part of a future C++ Standard. More Boost libraries are proposed for the upcoming TR2.

Bro Network Security Monitor

Bro provides a comprehensive platform for network traffic analysis, with a particular focus on semantic security monitoring at scale. While often compared to classic intrusion detection/prevention systems, Bro takes a quite different approach by providing users with a flexible framework that facilitates customized, in-depth monitoring far beyond the capabilities of traditional systems. With initial versions in operational deployment during the mid '90s already, Bro finds itself grounded in more than 20 years of research.

Buildbot

Buildbot is a freely-licensed framework which enables software developers to automate software build, test, and release processes for their software projects. First released in 2003, Buildbot is used by leading software projects around the world to automate all aspects of their software development cycle.

BusyBox

BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts. BusyBox provides a fairly complete environment for any small or embedded system.

BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind. It is also extremely modular so you can easily include or exclude commands (or features) at compile time. This makes it easy to customize your embedded systems. To create a working system, just add some device nodes in /dev, a few configuration files in /etc, and a Linux kernel.

Clojars

Clojars is a community-maintained repository for free and open source libraries written in the Clojure programming language. Clojars emphasizes ease of use, publishing library packages that are simple to use with build automation tools.

coreboot

coreboot is an extended firmware platform that delivers light

Pick a large, active open-source project and try to help with the problems its developers have. You will be loved.

Here are some of the problems I'm aware of within the Mozilla project.

Speed of development

'make' doesn't scale. An incremental build, even with no changes, takes at least a minute. (In contrast, just checking whether any files have changed takes 'hg' less than 10 seconds.) Maybe help us move to 'scons', or help improve 'pymake', or just help us get our dependency generation right.

'ld' is slow. Once a developer makes a change to any c++ file, the incremental build is going to take several minutes while the linker uses up all her RAM. Maybe help us move to another linker such as 'gold', and contribute any necessary changes back to the 'gold' project.

'hg' merges are confusing. hg's developer-facing user interface could be improved, both while doing a merge and after doing a merge.

Automated testing

We've built an interesting interface around hg-pushlog (which is itself a Mozilla extension to hg) and buildbot that lets us see which tests failed after each change. I'd love to see these tools generalized to the point where other open-source projects can use it and contribute back to it.

As we require unit and integration tests for more and more components of Firefox, we're finding that a small number of tests failing intermittently can make it difficult to move quickly. We could use better tools for tracking test failures, and for record-and-replay debugging to help us figure out the intermittent failures, and probably for other things we haven't thought of.

Programming languages

We need a decent low-level programming language. Something that lets programmers implement sneaky fast algorithms, but lets programmers do it without constantly shooting themselves in the foot with security holes. Something you'd want to write (difficult parts of) a web browser or OS in.

I don't know if the answer is adding more and more to the type system (like in Cyclone), or integration of assertions with static analysis (like in D), or simply making it easy to integrate low-level code with high-level code (like in C#, or with ctypes or jsctypes).

Mozilla is doing interesting things with custom static analysis of C++ code.

Making collaboration tools support workflow and GTD

We have a crash analysis system and a bug-tracking system with lots of information, but the workflow is poor, so much of the information is not acted upon.

It's hard to come up with a good workflow (and make the tools support that workflow) in a large project where many of the contributors are volunteers who decide themselves what to work on, but I think we can do better.

Just as one data point: here at SnapLogic, our product is open source. Myself and the other engineers are paid to work on GPLed software full time.

It's not just our core product. I'm responsible for the QA infrastructure, and in that role I've been able to contribute code to other projects we use: Django, Trac (one two three), Figleaf, and Buildbot (one two three four).

That's just what I have done personally, not to mention the other engineers. And it's not just something we do on the side - the company's upper management actively encourages us to contribute code back.

So in our particular case, just day to day operations intrisically seems to benefit the open source commmunity as a side effect. At least from my perspective (and by the way, I don't speak for SnapLogic). If something dramatic happened and we had to shut down, that would obviously stop.

[Holy cow, I'm being paid to write free software in my favorite language. Pinch me.]

Just as one data point: here at SnapLogic, our product is open source. Myself and the other engineers are paid to work on GPLed software full time.

It's not just our core product. I'm responsible for the QA infrastructure, and in that role I've been able to contribute code to other projects we use: Django, Trac (one two three), Figleaf, and Buildbot (one two three four).

That's just what I have done personally, not to mention the other engineers. And it's not just something we do on the side - the company's upper management actively encourages us to contribute code back.

So in our particular case, just day to day operations intrisically seems to benefit the open source commmunity as a side effect. At least from my perspective (and by the way, I don't speak for SnapLogic). If something dramatic happened and we had to shut down, that would obviously stop.

[Holy cow, I'm being paid to write free software in my favorite language. Pinch me.]

Just as one data point: here at SnapLogic, our product is open source. Myself and the other engineers are paid to work on GPLed software full time.

It's not just our core product. I'm responsible for the QA infrastructure, and in that role I've been able to contribute code to other projects we use: Django, Trac (one two three), Figleaf, and Buildbot (one two three four).

That's just what I have done personally, not to mention the other engineers. And it's not just something we do on the side - the company's upper management actively encourages us to contribute code back.

So in our particular case, just day to day operations intrisically seems to benefit the open source commmunity as a side effect. At least from my perspective (and by the way, I don't speak for SnapLogic). If something dramatic happened and we had to shut down, that would obviously stop.

[Holy cow, I'm being paid to write free software in my favorite language. Pinch me.]

Just as one data point: here at SnapLogic, our product is open source. Myself and the other engineers are paid to work on GPLed software full time.

It's not just our core product. I'm responsible for the QA infrastructure, and in that role I've been able to contribute code to other projects we use: Django, Trac (one two three), Figleaf, and Buildbot (one two three four).

That's just what I have done personally, not to mention the other engineers. And it's not just something we do on the side - the company's upper management actively encourages us to contribute code back.

So in our particular case, just day to day operations intrisically seems to benefit the open source commmunity as a side effect. At least from my perspective (and by the way, I don't speak for SnapLogic). If something dramatic happened and we had to shut down, that would obviously stop.

[Holy cow, I'm being paid to write free software in my favorite language. Pinch me.]

Just as one data point: here at SnapLogic, our product is open source. Myself and the other engineers are paid to work on GPLed software full time.

It's not just our core product. I'm responsible for the QA infrastructure, and in that role I've been able to contribute code to other projects we use: Django, Trac (one two three), Figleaf, and Buildbot (one two three four).

That's just what I have done personally, not to mention the other engineers. And it's not just something we do on the side - the company's upper management actively encourages us to contribute code back.

So in our particular case, just day to day operations intrisically seems to benefit the open source commmunity as a side effect. At least from my perspective (and by the way, I don't speak for SnapLogic). If something dramatic happened and we had to shut down, that would obviously stop.

[Holy cow, I'm being paid to write free software in my favorite language. Pinch me.]