Open Source Projects That You Should Know About?

cosyne asks: "Seeing the recent announcement about FreeS/WAN reminds me that there are many cool projects that I'm mostly unaware of (or, more often, completely oblivious to), which I only hear about when Slashdot posts a 'Developers finally giving up on this cool project' story. What projects (software or otherwise) are out there that would benefit from more involvement if only they had the publicity?"

Comments

Is this a joke?

[skaffen42]

... or is it a bug in /.? This article has been up for a day and no comments other than a single troll.

Re:Is this a joke?

[Paul Bain]

Is this [story] a joke? . . . Or is it a bug in /.?

I am fairly certain that it is a bug in Slashdot because I did not see this story until nearly 24 hours after it was posted (I first saw it on Wednesday at about 8:15 PM (U.S. Eastern Time)) notwithstanding that I visited Slashdot at least twice between the time that this story was posted and the time that I first saw this story.

Slashdot editors, could you please re-post this story? This topic is of great interest to many of us.

Re:Is this a joke?

[CPD]

i never thought i see the day where someone asks for a dupe to be posted.

PocketWarrior

[Emrikol]

Wow...sure is quiet in this post. I'd figure this one would be a fun one that I could look and find some cool new programs to try out. Guess I should've known better. (I'm not new here)

Anyways...

I like PocketWarrior but it saddens me that it will not currently work with my Dell Axim X3i and the built in Wi-Fi. Otherwise, I'd be having a lot more fun with my little PPC.

Eerie

[Mmm coffee]

I can see tumbleweeds rolling through this thread. Too "Just woke up" to link, google for this stuff. xfce - Nice little window manager for X, a slight hassle to build but otherwise a great WM for those who want something that screams "minimalist". If only they'd allow me to shove the menubar into the taskbar so I don't have to have two bars on autohide then I'd be using it right now. Ruby - Goddamn, this is a wonderful language! It's as close to "I think, it does" as you can get without having neural implants. That's about all that I can think of. Ignoring the usual (gaim, etc) because they're very well known.

Re:Eerie

[Mmm coffee]

Note to self - use the preview function.

Open Music Registry

[SnakeStu]

This isn't open source software, but copyleft applied to music... The Open Music Registry is an interactive database of music that is licensed under copyleft-style licenses, including the Open Audio License, one of the Creative Commons licenses, and more. Follow the link in my signature to check it out.

(Not that anybody will probably see this now... not sure what's up with this story and its lack of visibility...)

Chicken and egg

[tcopeland]

> What projects (software or otherwise) are
> out there that would benefit from more
> involvement if only they had the publicity?"

I think the problem is that projects that are useful and popular get as much developer help as they need, whereas those projects that aren't getting helped are usually in that situation for good reasons.

For example, I work on a clunky little DOOM map generator. I wrote it as a way to a) generate very simple maps and b) learn about bitpacking in Ruby. So the fact that it only gets 3 downloads a day is fine - it's serving its purpose.

If you want to help a popular open source project - Open Office or Mozilla or some such - a way to do it might be to download Valgrind and find a memory leak or two. Submit a couple of patches and you'll be doing lots of people a favor, and you'll probably get mad props from the project you're contributing to for getting some grunt work accomplished.

Tooting my own horn...

[Yaztromo]

My Open Source Project, the jSyncManager Project (http://www.jsyncmanager.org) could certainly use more help and attention. It's a pure Java solution for synchronizing PalmOS based handhelds with applications and databases. It has a completely object-oriented protocol stack, and only requires jUSB or the Java Communications API to communicate, making it completely platform-neutral. It doesn't need to be ported between platforms ala pilot-link, nor does it rely on the Windows HotSync Manager like most other PalmOS-based Java sync solutions, so it will run the same on Linux, OS/2, Windows, MacOS, *BSD, and anything else that can run Java.

We've been doing pretty well attracting users, particularily in the corporate space because the applications and APIs are mature (the project will be celebrating 5 years since its initial 1.0 release this May), stable, and allow easy development in Java.

But getting people to contribute code has been a real hassle, as has been trying to get developers of other Java-based Open Source applications to use our code and specs (like our jConduit plug-in spec for creating your own pure Java conduit plug-ins) -- even in cases where it makes perfect sense to do so (like for JPluck -- a pure Java toolkit for Plucker, which while being pure, cross-platform Java in the toolkit itself, provides only a native Windows conduit for synchroniation).

The project is at the state right now where we have tons of potential users who would like to se more plug-ins, but a complete dearth of willing Open Source developers to actually write them. Sure, now and then some user/developer might supply a patch to fix something minor, but it's exceedingly rare than anyone ever volunteers to develop something new (and when they do, it's rarer still that they actually follow through).

Sorry for the rant -- but the project has long been close to my heart, people who have seen and used it rank it quite highly, and we have lots of willing users -- we're just lacking the developers. It makes me understand why some other OS project administrators (like the LRP guys) can be willing to throw in the towel. Everyone wants new features, but finding the willing developers who will actually put any real time into development can be exceedingly frustrating.

Yaz.

My SourceForge bookmarks

[exhilaration]

These are my bookmarks on SourceForge.net:

audacity - multiplatform audio editing
bluewalk - automated bluetooth 'hacking' for Symbian smartphones
dcl - a web-based project mgmt systems
gaim - multiplatform AIM / MSN\Yahoo Messenger clone
gallery PHP/web-based photo gallery
opl-dev - scripting env for Symbian smartphones
s2putty - SSH for Symbian smartphones
semagic - LiveJournal client
sodipodi - multiplatform illustration app
squirrelmail - PHP-based webmail
ultravnc - best VNC client/server for Windows
winscp - SCP (and secure FTP) client for Windows
xplanet - funky app that shows you the earth + current cloud cover

Re:My SourceForge bookmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

FileZilla The BEST ftp client for Windows that I've ever used!

Well

[immyz]

If a project isn't popular, there won't be anyone to tell you it's cool.

At best, you'll have a bunch of solo project owners hoping to get some help. In which case, you may as well just browse through the SF.net directory.

For small office/home networks

[j()nty]

...which is where I do most of my work.

• dnsmasq - A DHCP+DNS server that is simple to configure, lets you set up names for local machines and local services, lets you block external names of your choice, etc, etc
• masqmail - A mail server for machines with intermittent connections to the internet (dialup, laptops, wireless)
• Xmail - A slightly bigger mail server for when you want to run your own domain. Linux and Windows.
• Icewm - The window manager for people who want to get their work done
• Bluefish - Text/HTML/Perl/PHP/Java/etc editor that just works.

Re:For small office/home networks

[j()nty]

Oh, I missed this:

• msntp - A small, simple SNTP (not SMTP) server+client to force all the machines on your LAN use the same clock time

a few more

[smartalecvt]

Lilypond: A great open source music notation program.

Cinepaint: Painting and retouching.

CDex: CD Ripper and converter.

Panda 3d: 3D rendering engine.

Mambo: Content management

Gordian Knot:DivX/XviD encoding

Helix: Media player

7 Zip: Zip

Here's Mine

[shyster]

Since this thread is so quiet, I'll go ahead and add one.

Unattended is a system for installing Windows and apps hands-off. Great use of Perl and BATch files to do something useful. Kind of a PITA to set up, but once going, it's well worth the time investment.

Re:Here's Mine

[The Angry Mick]

There's a typo in the link, here's the right one.

ratpoison

[sleepingsquirrel]

And for those looking for the true minimalist window manager (and not some fancy graphical pretender), they should look at ratpoison.

Caudium

[Anonymous Coward]

Caudium

Fast, secure, extensible, modular, easy to admin (for newbies) without sacrificing power (you can still edit the config files if you wish). With the sole exception of installed user base, it beats Apache in every category.

Some of My Favourites

[highwindarea]

Boost. A collection of small c++ libraries for things like signal handling, compile-time metaprogramming, lambda functions etc. I think most c++ programmers would find some of this useful.

Soya 3d This is a 3d library for python built on top of openGL. I find it's a lot higher level than calling OpenGL directly. It handles collision detection, rendering, animation, model loading etc, with a very shallow learning curve but still flexible.

Cypherpunk Networks

[protocol420]

Here's some cool darknets being developed:

Invisible IRC Proxy
Its a seperate IRC network that hides the IP of the users and encrypts all the traffic coming in and out. semi-centralized, not totally anon due to small size

Freenet Project
Kinda like a decentralized encrypted RAID + Usenet. High latency, high bandwith. More for publishing than interactivity, although there is a cool BBS prog for it.

Invisible Internet Project
You heard it hear first! I2P, the next generation of anonymous communication, not yet publiclly announced. Its in pre-alpha, but functional and needing good coders. Low latency, high bandwith. Any internet prog should run over it, currently got IRC, NNTP (usenet), HTTP, chessd, Jabber, and experimental Bittorrent. We meet on IIP (above) in chan #i2p

some audio, some

[slinkp]

ardour http://ardour.org/
hard disk recorder & digital audio workstation.

ladspa http://ladspa.org
audio plugins for linux.

hydrogen http://hydrogen.sf.net
drum machine for linux

seq24 http://www.filter24.org/seq24/
a very nice little looping midi sequencer

jack http://jackit.sf.net
plug all your linux audio apps into each other and blow your mind.

zope http://zope.org
app server written in python, great for content management, way cool and weird.

twisted http://www.twistedmatrix.com
python framework for whipping up custom servers and clients with astonishing ease. Comes with some fully useable and scaleable examples.