Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Does the FOSS Community Currently Need?
First time accepted submitter d33tah writes "In the summer term of my final year of IT's bachelor's course in my university, every student is obliged to develop his own project; the only requirement is that the application would use any kind of a database. While others are thinking of another useless system for an imaginary company that nobody would actually use, I'd rather hack up something the FL/OSS community actually needs. The problem is — how to figure out what it could be?"
How about something fun, like filesystem statistics? Keep track of the most used files to make sure you spread the disk and your mental load equally. Quite possibly useless, but could be fun to do. The hooks into the FS might be the hardest part about this, though.
Write a generic ETL app. Quite useful. Might be many out there, though. Probably few good free ones..
Or something that converts a (well known) log format into database entries for the purpose of easier statistics than what grep can provide?.
For instance, take a webserver log, dump it into the database and generate something like a visitation path..
The database isn't technically needed for this, of course, but with a large dataset, you can't keep it all in memory, so it would be useful..
Move sig!
If the OP really means what the community as a whole needs rather than one useful thing for part of that community, then ironically I think you've just nailed it: more than anything else, the community needs a way to match up willing and able contributors with projects that could benefit from their contributions.
To do that, the OP could develop a simple database that understands things like:
Provide some sort of keyword store (extension: recognise related entries/common aliases) or defined scale for each property, let projects say what they need and volunteers say what they're willing to contribute, and help people get matched up.
This has the handy advantage for the OP of being readily scalable from a simple proof of concept with a simple native or web-based UI right up to a full-blown and genuinely useful service if you can find a way of getting it hosted properly. It might help particularly with contribution in areas other than programming, which in practice is often where OSS projects run by volunteers for free start to fall behind commercial projects run by businesses with cross-disciplinary teams.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
How many people here can't read the fucking summary? here's a shot at it. How about a de-duplicator for music/photos that would (nicely) hunt for media, throw the metadata in the database, search for identical and almost-identical files, and then beautifully show the output. Bonus points if you beat the standard interface to these things which is just a list of duplicated files. I'd suggestb bubble diagrams that show how many files in which folders are duplicates of others.