Slashdot Mirror
The Best Unknown Open Source Projects
itwbennett writes "Carla Schroder points to an interesting trend in open source: 'The growth of large distributed projects.' OpenTox, which uses computer modeling instead of animal testing for chemical toxicity testing, and AMEE (Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine), which uses open source software and methodologies to collect, map, measure and analyze carbon dioxide data, are two such projects. 'FOSS presents a natural platform for building large distributed projects because of the low barrier to entry — open code, open standards, and freely-available robust, high-quality high-performance software,' says Schroder."
What open source project gets less attention than you think it deserves?
I don't really know of any. I guess that's sort of the problem.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
www.projectfedena.org
This guys has been going since 2006, and I just heard about it yesterday.
http://www.wikispeedia.org/
He's trying to map all of the speed limit signs, so you can then have a database of what your current speed SHOULD be. Now, whether you obey it is another issue altogether ;) . Seems like a worthwhile endeavor. I know I have gotten a speeding ticket because I mis-took a white "speed limit" sign for a yellow "speed suggestion" sign (on a long exit ramp).
Definitely Linux. Though I'm sure we'll eventually see it gain some acceptance!
Namecoin
> What open source project gets less attention than you think it deserves?
Carla is an example of the many good Americans who have value and go unnoticed because everyone wastes time with billionaires. And their worthless OSes.
BTW, I'm a foreigner and critical of the US. If I say something is good on the US, move it up one notch to "excellent" level.
Personal opinion of mine, solely.
Because it seems certain that whatever source code that powers this site is in desperate need of re-work or just outright re-implementation.
It is sad when a self described open source site is using such crappy, buggy, unusable software. It needs to eat its own dogfood.
Sorry but this is the truth, slashcode needs help.
Sounds like something hipsters would be involved in. But only if they could be involved ironically.
I know of many but they are just too 1337 to let you loosers know about them. :)
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
"What open source project gets less attention than you think it deserves?" Linux.
The Learning Registry makes federal learning resources easier to find, easier to access and easier to integrate into learning environments wherever they are stored -- around the country and the world. This will enable teachers, students, parents, schools, governments, corporations and non-profits to build and access better, more interconnected and personalized learning solutions needed for a 21st-century education.
http://www.learningregistry.org
Personally, I like what I'm seeing out of the ThinkUp project as a tool to digest social media activity.
Also, the Ushahidi project, which is responsible for Crowdmap and Sweeper (and the upcoming SwiftMeme). Crazy powerful when used right, and awesome components that all lend to each other and enable good crisis communication, among other things.
What is your favorite breed of dog?
I ask, because "What open source project gets less attention than you think it deserves?" has pretty much nothing to do with the actual topic - large distributed open-source projects - which apparently the submitter forgot at some point during the submission process.
#DeleteChrome
1. Make a distributed network (like the old Stanford@Home)
2. Allow the installing user to either let the network decide the best use for his extra processing power or let him select distributed projects...
3. Have the machine perform auto-updates automatically, and if there's a fault, roll back to last known good configuration automatically.
If you have a powerful GPU, you'd get weighted towards distributed projects that could use that, for instance. Don't want your CPU% over 15%? Specify that in the client, Want it disabled from 7am - 5pm on weekdays? Specified in the client. ...in fact, why isn't this done already?
Two awesome photo management apps that fit almost any workflow with a very clean, intuitive interface. Gwenview is a lighter program that's very easy to use and Digikam is a more professional one with some very advanced features.
I've always pictured the color of OS zealotry as a sort of bright flamingo pinkish hue
Open-source ClearCase-like revision control and configuration management. Completely automatic dependency detection for any kind of build or tool, site-wide caching (for any kind of tool), O(1) checkouts/checkins, etc. Been around forever; was easily doing all of these things 10 years ago--nobody knows it exists.
www.vestasys.org
It's progressing slowly, but the Free Charge Controller project at http://www.freechargecontroller.org has the potential to lower the cost of adopting solar technology at the consumer level.
Chris Troutner
thesolarpowerexpert.com
No mod points, sorry.
Here's a federal research project utilizing open source including CouchDb: http://www.couchbase.com/case-studies/learningregistry
www.learningregistry.org
It's an interesting example of exactly the OP's point: that low barriers to entry and ease of adoption and growth make OSS an attractive strategy for lots of work.
I doubt it's unknown, but this one has saved my bacon at least twice: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
The projects do have a bit of a liberal slant to them. What ever happened to OpenKillThemAllAndLetGodSortThemOut and the "CCTV Facial Recognition at Home" Initiative?
RTEMS (http://www.rtems.org) is a 20+ year old project that most people here have never heard of. But you have seen the results of projects that use it. NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory (http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/) and Dawn (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/main/index.html) missions, ESA's Herschel (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel/index.html) and Planck (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Planck/index.html) projects, JPL's Electra radio that circles Mars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Reconnaissance_Orbiter#Engineering_instruments). Physics labs including Stanford Linear Accelerator, Argonne, and Canadian Light Source have used RTEMS based instruments to make contributions to science. Commercial applications include engine control, building control and intercom systems, data logging, environmental monitoring, and medical devices. RTEMS is out there in the real world in lots of things which you might have used but never knew free software was there.
An open source rules engine with a focus on flexibility, small foot print, limited dependencies (no runtime dependencies), and clear descriptions of business logic. Does not implement backtracking or forward chaining, and thus very fast, very easy to use, and relatively easy to debug... ...and very unknown.
Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. No link; it's been hardly a month since I last slashdotted a Free software site. You can google it if you're serious.
True, it doesn't do anything spectacularly useful. But it's not useless and there are few things better for testing the stability of your CPU.
SSIA
MAME OS X. Dave Dribin can no longer work on this, now that he works for Apple. The forum for discussing MAME OS X is: http://forums.bannister.org/
SheepShaver. When Apple dropped support for the Classic Environment, this became our only practical link to the fabulous apps of our youth (or our parents' youth, if you're a young pup).
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
distributed.net has almost all of those features, but it's not sexy anymore.
By now is a MUST for any ebook reader owner, or people that read ebooks in general, even in their computer.
But califying it as "unknown", well, lets say that in the line that goes from linux, vlc or php in known projects to open source projects not even known by their own authors (don't know any example, but that is part of their definition), is pretty high in the scale.
http://www.lyx.org/
A ``What You See is What You Mean'' document editor which uses LaTeX to typeset final output, it has a lot of other options and a nice, sensible, straight-forward interface which is everything Word's Ribbon is not.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I used to dream of setting up an office network environment based on Linux and FOSS. Only, there there was one thing missing: a proper file system. That's why I think OpenAFS -- the distributed file system -- deserves more attention.
Most *nix fans use either NFS, which is simple, but scales badly and lacks encryption, or Samba, which was designed to support Windows clients. OpenAFS, on the other hand, offers file sharing and replicated read-only content distribution, provides location independence, scalability, security, and transparent migration capabilities. Client software includes support for UNIX, Linux, MacOS X, and Windows. The code base is very stable and it has an active development and support community.
I bumped into Elasticsearch the other day. It is ridiculously awesome. Best Lucene frontend I've run into
The Tcl/Tk programming language
The OpenKomodo editor.
A project that really deserves support and attention is OpenSymphonia, a project to record a entire openmedia/open source orchestral library for use with Linuxsampler and release in FLAC.
It is actually starting crowdfunding quite soon, got my support!
http://opensymphonia.sf.net
JavaScript and C++ decision table based rules engine. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/library/logician.aspx.
I absolutely love to use zim (http://zim-wiki.org/) and kupfer (http://kaizer.se/wiki/kupfer/).
The former is a local wiki/notetaking app. I find it very useful to collect stuff and write technical stuff and manage simple TODO lists. I know there are many similar apps (cherrytree) but I am most comfortable with zim.
Kupfer is a quicksilver-like launcher that is extremely fast and uses no RAM or CPU whatsoever. Out of all the ones I tried (including Do) it's the best for my needs, and being written/expandable by python, it's easy to write a plugin for a specific task or program.
There's also iLua (https://github.com/ilua/ilua) which is a powered Lua shell with some built-in helpers such as table serializers and such. Unfortunately it's not compatible with 5.2 (yet?).
I'd say RepRap. Not that it is "unknown", but strange it is not mentioned all that often when one thinks about from that first blogpost in -05 and what have happened since. Especially these days when you can get the plasticparts (clonedel), stepper motors on ebay and a small drillpress for cheaps. Not to mention tiny "one board", easy to solder through hole solutions like Sanguinololu.
Passwordmaker generates ditto for all my internets accounts, pinpadlocks etc. Runs on whatever you throw it at, as javascript, android, crapple, N900 (Thanks George (caco3)!), as CLI. Portable to say the least, mature and of course secure to the extent of what cards you got up your sleeve.
I use Zim to organize everything these days! It's stays out of your way and doesn't complicate things. It uses textfiles as database, which is really nice as you get access to your stuff quickly through a terminal for example. Ok, sure I long for the day that it gets say a Couchdb-plugin...
Redshift safes my eyes from getting cooked. I have yet to download that maemosandbox and compile it for my N900 though. There was a new release a few days ago btw, some new fine functions and not "just" bugfixes!
"If terrorists hate us for our freedom, does that mean they're slowly starting to like us?" -- Philosoraptor.
Mac OS doesn't even have that!
FOG Project, hands down. It's better than any of the commercially available imaging products that are available, and solves MUCH more than imaging.
Im kind of biased but I really think LinuxMCE is a really awesome yet pretty much unknown open source project. I mean, it incorporates mythtv, stored movies and tv, streaming audio, and THEN there is the whole home automation aspect with security cameras, lighting, av, and climate control. Been using it for a couple years and i still think its pretty damned cool that 1 remote rules them all. And when i say all, i mean all. From the lights and ac down to controlling every piece of equipment in the av stack. Im so much of an unashamed fan boy thats its convinced me to start learning c++ in an effort to help the small group of devs.
So yeah, thats my vote : http://www.linuxmce.org Because its about as close to the 'Jarvis' from iron man as ive come across in an open source project.
-golgoj4
One great project that it seems few people know about is Hugin, which is great for photo stitching (panoramas), perspective correction, etc.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Ekiga (www.ekiga.org) is a softphone program for VOIP communication. I'm sure several people know about it, but few have discovered its potential. In general, VOIP software gets little attention. I'm sure many know about Skype, and other similar services, but Ekiga (and the like) can be used to eliminate altogether the need for a phone landline if you already have access to the web. With Ekiga, you can call a regular phone, or pc-to-pc with a video & audio text chat in parallel.
Since I'm at it, you should also take a look at Asterisk (www.asterisk.org) , the IP PBX to go along with softphones.
DH
Homepage
"Tahoe-LAFS is a Free and Open cloud storage system. It distributes your data across multiple servers. Even if some of the servers fail or are taken over by an attacker, the entire filesystem continues to function correctly, including preservation of your privacy and security."
Still in active development.
any project that isn't "How can I write something to sell more useless crap and make some business more money." Software can be like a miraculous tool. The fact that it's used mostly as a way to sell widgets to wankers on the web somewhere nauseates me daily. Microsoft is notably awful in this regard. If you're creating medical or engineering software, you don't exist for them. Not enough money.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Now, there might be something out there, but I'm not aware of it. I'd love to find (and support!) and open source ERP tool. When I first found Spiceworks (http://spiceworks.com/), I fell in love with its ease of use, feature-richness, and simplicity. I'd love to see an open source project that would do for ERP what Spiceworks has done for network monitoring/management.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Apache.
Everyone hates me because I'm paranoid.
No-one is hoping to make money from them.
Pulling a shameless plug here, since I'm one of the original developers and occasional contributor.
RTMPD is a C++ implementation of RTMP, which supports all protocol extensions and server side
scripting in Lua and Javascript (using V8).
Ampache, I had my music hosted in the cloud by myself and streaming to my phone before all the big companies were doing it thanks to AMPACHE . My friends have access to it and they help with the rating of music. It keeps my playlist fresh.
nephthys!
For share files with others, its a perfect replacement for FTP and avoiding the cloud pitfall.
Its based in webdav with a very simple web interface to allow users to share files. It auto expires shared files, so you do dont waste space with forgotten shares.
the git needs a few tweaks to work in a recent debian ( i will send a patch do the developer in a few days/weeks)... the .deb packages didnt worked for me
yet this is a very simple solution and works very in windows, macox and linux
it is almost unknown, but it saved me from thousand of user calls asking for help with ftp problems (clients, access, quotas and transfer)
Higuita
> What open source project gets less attention than you think it deserves?
All of them.
This is a PaaS type integration Cloud but it facilitates light-weight integration
CloudI: A Cloud as an Interface.
Dump (and restore) allow one to make backups of filesystems in ways far superior to what can be accomplished with tar.
Etherape allows the visualization (in real time) of network traffic patterns.
Grace is a powerful graphing and data exploration tool.
Htmldoc allows the generation of PDF and other output formats from HTML input.
Ntop allows one to slice-and-dice network trafffic many different ways; it's another tool that's highly useful for understanding WTF is going on.
W3m is a text-only browser, sort of the web equivalent to the superb mutt email client.
The musicians here may want to check out LMMS. I can't believe it took me so long to take heed of it.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
A distributed, fault-tolerant POSIX filesystem that works rather well!
Mp3Cleaner
Bundler and CMVS, which are command-line tools that in combination can be used to generate 3D models from a set of ordinary camera photos (i.e. photogrammetry). Several people have taken that code and modified it into collections of tools (e.g., this one) that streamline the process and use GPU code to speed it up. You can then load up the output into Meshlab, a great tool for rendering and editing the resulting point clouds before bringing them into something like Blender 3D (which is well-known).
Even more technical is GPlates, a comprehensive, research-grade tool for doing plate tectonic reconstruction. It's like a combination of conventional GIS system and Google Earth, but you can position anything back in geological time with it. You can load up your own data and published plate motion models from the literature. You really have to understand how plate motion is represented in a technical sense to use it properly (i.e. Euler poles), but even if you don't, you can still use the reconstruction poles, plate outlines, etc. in the supplied data files, plus read the tutorial (a necessity), and then generate a map to your liking. Even better, the program can output a series of image frames that you can then turn into a movie. You can also output a series of projected data files that are easily used in GMT -- Generic Mapping Tools, another wonderful and adaptable open source tool for mapping that has been around for years. Although it is entirely command-line and has a very steep learning curve, if you're used to typical UNIX command-line tools, then GMT is not that bad, it integrates nicely with the UNIX tools you know, and it is very powerful. There are some GUI-based derivatives of it, but I haven't used them.
Those are pretty specialized and would only interest people interested in those subjects, but just today I found PDFtk, a command-line tool to manipulate PDF files (split, merge, rotate pages, etc.). It's exactly what I've been looking for to automate PDF document generation from multiple sources.
Chronomancer (and Chronicle, which it uses) is a debugger that will let you step backwards through your code. Want to know why your app seg faulted? Step back and it'll show you where and what all the registers contained before they get overwritten. It'll let you undo memory corruption, find out what happened before you overwrote vital pieces of data, and it makes debugging problems that are insanely hard trivial.
How it works is that Chronicle is a specialised version of valgrind which writes the result of every instruction to a (highly, highly compressed) database. Once it's run, Chronomancer is an Eclipse-based query tool that lets you study the contents of this database. Apart from being able to step forwards and backwards it supports things like search queries so you can ask it 'when was the last write to location X before time T' and it'll tell you. It is very, very cool.
It's also almost completely unknown, and seems to have been abandoned for years, which is a huge shame as it's an utterly awesome tool. Even building it is hard; Chronicle exists as a patch to valgrind 3.3.1 which doesn't work on modern libcs (3.6 is current). This is a tool that's crying out for some love...
The Realeyes IDS reassembles sessions and performs analysis on data streams in both directions. When a session is reported, both halves of the session are displayed in the playback window. It is a complete system that uses the PostgreSQL DB as a backend and has a Java UI. Some people have had problems building the DB, but I am happy to help. http://realeyes.sourceforge.net/ Later . . . Jim
BRL-CAD is a great project with an extensive legacy that doesn't get nearly enough developer attention. With hundreds of staff years effort invested across tons of functionality, it's really the *only* open source CAD system viable for production use, yet it's still in need of devs to help improve the interface and usability.
You'd think the massive market size of the CAD/CAM industry (estimated around $8B annual) would help, but that really just attracts LOTS of users. Thousands a month. Many understandably get put off by the steep learning curve and UNIX-style design or cry for features implemented in their favorite commercial CAD system that took loads of manpower.
The project is crazy active with the dozen or so devs that already do contribute, but the open source developer community at large doesn't seem to know about the project. Some are probably put off by the size of BRL-CAD (1M+ loc), but that's actually rather tiny for a production CAD system. The project deficiencies are well known (usability, interface!), but takes lots time and effort to make things better. Takers?
Cheers!
Sean
I use mu (mail utility) which works off a xapian database, and outputs the result into a maildir folder. It gives faster than gmail searches which work in any mail client (eg. mutt).
SJW n. One who posts facts.
OpenMRS is pretty cool - it's an electronic medical record platform (i.e. webapp) that was made for clinics and hospitals in the 3rd world. It's interesting that they can get this kind of stuff working in Africa but the US is still having problems. It is an active project, but they don't seem to get a lot of attention and it sounds like they could use some help.
Just to name the above engines, the first two for Quake1 data to re-present it better than Doom3 graphics (Tenebrae).
Jake2 quite a good portable Quake 2 port.
ioQuake3 is a replacement engine for all things you know, and some really good stand-alone games use it like ZEQ2 or Bid For Power and Tremulous.
Obviously, the purpose of AMEE is to produce consume more power and release more carbon dioxide so as to feed plants and improve the environment.
Most people choose their favorite dog by whichever they came in contact with first.
So let me guess, you dated a transgender back in a musical college that you think is still the best even after running away from making it to her 3rd-base and home plate?
Then there is The Bounty Hunter, so I'm guessing you left the courtroom before posting bale?
Now I see Windows ME is your least favorite...as if you knew, because you you don't use it right? Right??? No, you probably used Windows ME for 3 years and after switching to XP you simply find yourself going back to Windows ME like you stalk your first trans-girlfriend you ran from.
Distributed.net is a 404. Please fix your link, I really do want to follow it.
For optimal comment enjoyment, take red pill now.
Brain Workshop is a free, open-source program which can make you smarter. It implements the dual n-back task, which has been shown to improve people's performance on IQ tests in three separate studies.
[...]GPlates, a comprehensive, research-grade tool for doing plate tectonic reconstruction.
Interesting, thanks!
Hi, I know these guys have FOSS driving all the electronics on their FOSH. http://opensourceecology.org/
I have been using notmuch for a week, its way faster than gmail on a 4GB Maildir folder I use for work, I love mutt !
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
GeoGebra (www.geogebra.org) is taking over math classrooms worldwide, but without much press coverage etc
Why GeoGebra is not used and embraced by more math teachers is beyond me.
http://www.geogebra.org
GeoGebra is the best
Geogebra (www.geogebra.org) "is free and multi-platform dynamic mathematics software for all levels of education that joins geometry, algebra, tables, graphing, statistics and calculus in one easy-to-use package." It is awesome software, I use it and recommend it highly.
all of mine!
Seriously, though, how many of us have started really well-architected or well-thought out problems but yet we've never attracted enough attention to them to get them really started? I have a ton of things that I'd like to see gain more traction, but I think they're highly helpful but I don't have time to do the marketing. That and geeks are good at marketing in the first place.
The WAZE client for smartphones is opensource and uses the open maps project !
Notational Velocity for OS X. Modeless notetaking at its best that synchronises with Simplenote.
http://notational.net/
I see no 404. http://distributed.net/ try again.