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Ask Slashdot: What Would You Pay To See Open Sourced?
jbrase writes:
It's in the interest of the open-source community to make open-source development as profitable as possible. One potential means of making money from open source is crowdfunding, [but] proprietary vendors aren't likely to be enthusastic about using their flagship product to try out a relatively untested business model. Crowdfunding the open source release of legacy technologies of historical significance could provide a low-risk way for vendors to experiment with making money by crowdfunding: The product has already turned them a profit.
With that, I'd like to ask Slashdot readers, what would you pay to see open sourced?
Slashdot reader jonwil left a comment suggesting old games ("where the game is no longer being developed/worked on and where the engine/tech is no longer being used for anything"). But the sky's the limit here, so leave your own best answers in the comments. What would you pay to see open sourced?
With that, I'd like to ask Slashdot readers, what would you pay to see open sourced?
Slashdot reader jonwil left a comment suggesting old games ("where the game is no longer being developed/worked on and where the engine/tech is no longer being used for anything"). But the sky's the limit here, so leave your own best answers in the comments. What would you pay to see open sourced?
... no, Gimp is not an adequate replacement.
BeOS
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
M$ lock-in is the worst thing about Windows 7. It's a great desktop OS in most ways. I paid $300(AUD) for it anyway - it would have been nice to pay $300 for it to be free instead.
Nothing else currently available on Windows comes close.
...or at least, the Win32 API and userspace components needed to run Windows applications.
Nvidia sucks.
The JVM
Oh wait. Too close to home?
What they are for, what they do, what code runs on them, the whole shebang.
by the hipsters at /.
1. Microsoft Windows
2. Apple iOS
3. Apple Siri
4. Google search engine
5. Amazon e-commerce engine, including recommendation
6. Amazon fulfillment engine
7. Cisco IOS
8. Oracle RDBMS
9. MATLAB
What would you pay to see open sourced?
Maya
macOS
#DeleteFacebook
SoylentNews has a fork that is mostly the old open sourced SlashCode from ~10-15 years ago, updated with new stylesheets and a few minor format modifications. Unlike the current slashdot site it also supports collapsed threading view via stylesheets and without javascript, so none of this 'you need javascript enabled to see all the messages, or log in.' BS
The site isn't nearly as popular as the slash, and the quality of articles is about the same, but the code seems pretty nice, and it is updated to mod_perl 2.0 and all the other fund new tech so you can use it with a modern apache server instead of 1.3 :)
... stream it?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
A modern version of Dungeon Keeper 2.
Top to bottom, we should have a DRM-free open-source cell phone, including hardware and software.
There are no open source CAD softwares capable of producing the drawings used in architecture, engineering, design, and manufacturing. Yet, that same, expensive proprietary package continues on with the same performance hogging, unstable, fluff enhanced software that hasn't really changed in 15 years.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
..it would be like having everyone's DNA unravel all at once, and all that would remain would be spaghetti code filling every corner of the conceivable universe!
Not disagreeing with the autocad comment.
And WordPress. $deity, that shit is awful.
its the only thing stopping me from kissing windows bye bye and switching to linux 100%
FoxPro, best tool ever for ad-hoc data chomping.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm willing to pay for any useful software, proprietary or open source, as long as I am free with no restrictions to use it on all my devices without further hassle. I refuse to buy any software that restricts me to one installation.
Want to see how it works and compiles
... for Windows Freecell.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Toady won't live forever. Moreover, what he has produced is very difficult to build on without his participation (specifically tracking combat). As a superior talent in a number of fields, I'm sure there's plenty of lessons to be learned from the code about scaling very large, application development, from a solo developer perspective.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Here are just a few:
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Office
Flash
Audio Drivers for mid-high/high-end audio interfaces by companies such as:
RME, Lynx, Burl, Prism, Antelope, Apogee
- Many of these companies say their devices support class compliant, but they're most are not natively supported enough to be run on linux. Can't get any professional audio work done there.
Roku devices
Any Smart TV firmware - So we have the ability to go in, flash it, run a custom one, or disable all call-home features
Intel Management Engine and AMD's equivalent
(See Smart TV firmware)
Automobile firmware - so we can keep companies such as Tesla honest by not sending home every piece of obscure data they have on the driver back home
Routers - so we can override whatever techniques they're now putting in on purpose to block users from running custom firmware.
Computer BIOS
Should be easy as they ported to Linux several years ago.
You just ned 559Billion dollars as of last friday.
To be sensitive to common problems in society, GIMP needs to be renamed to "Disabled Image Editor" otherwise known as DIE to be a better representation of its usability helping your hopes of editing an image die one step at a time.
Any game that customers paid for that requires a central server that the parent company shuts down after a couple years, bricking the game. Seriously, this shit should be illegal, but it's growing..
This seems to me to be an obvious first port of call. The weak points become well documented so also become well protected. Couldn't get a better demo of the security obtained.
If it was good enough for the army...
The only bad part about it is that it is a total pain to build on linux. Older versions UI was literally from either the 70s or early 90s, and it has a high learning curve.
Latest versions even include gcode solvers for end to end design, modelling, and gcode output.
That said, AutoCAD or 3D Studio Max would be awesome just for exporting the Star Trek ship models available into another format. It really sucks how all the coolest ships are only in max format so anyone unwilling to pirate needs to spend thousands of dollars just to open/render/reexport them. :(
Sorry about the Outlook, but the business users made me say it ;)
Fuck you, Blizzard.
Aperture. Apple abandoned it and it is (still) so much better than Lightroom
StarCraft. The game is very popular and is being used in AI research. But if you want to write your bots under Linux, you are bound to have a pretty hard time.
I miss the old days.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
As opposed to yo mamma who is open sores, not open sourced...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If there is any piece of software that needs to be auditable and have options for self-hosting it is password managers. Especially now that 1Password is backing off of their support for hosting your database file somewhere other than their servers.
Unfortunately, I haven't found any open source password managers that pass the WAF, which requires seamless browser integration and syncing on all major platforms.
Now called Affinity, and priced at $50. I could buy dinner for 7 with that.
Unlikely to happen. By the time the patents expire on 20-year-old radio protocols, the spectrum licensees have moved on to protocols several generations newer and sunset service using the old protocol. Case in point: Neither analog cell phone service nor D-AMPS TDMA works anymore on U.S. carriers.
I would like the future of my country to be decided by the people and in the open. No more back-room dealing and secrecy.
Voting machine software seems to be the easy answer.
Machine language proper lacks variable and subroutine names, comments (which document each subroutine's preconditions), and the original data from which compressed level maps were generated. This is what an NES game's asm source code looks like:
Thwaite; RHDE
Probably the most amazing operating system I've ever used, albeit very long in the tooth today. There's an open source clone, AROS, but I'd love to see the real thing open sourced, removing all the legal questions once and for all and allowing people to fork it and move it forward.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Visual FoxPro. Would be great to have a 64 bit version. FoxPro was really great at data manipulation.
I know that not all of OS/X is opened sourced beyond Darwin (unless things has changed in the last few years when I last looked). Surprised no one brought up OS/X so far.
Presto is (was) the rendering engine used in Opera versions 7-12. They even talked a little about open-sourcing it after the switch to Chromium/Blink, but unfortunately nothing ever came of it. It would need a rewrite for multiprocessing and ... well, all the new stuff in the web in the last few years, but at the time it was sppedy and flexible. If we're being realistic about thing that could be open-sourced, that's the top of my list.
Total Commander - there isn't a comparable File Manager, although DoubleCMD and MultiCommander at least try.
Sketchup would be great.
Free cad is a joke and there are no truly good parametric 3d modeling application for linux
Clippy! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I would release a distro called Gnu is Now Unix
http://saveie6.com/
Google's Picassa had unmatched facial recognition, and I've got 500Gb of photos to organize... but there was a bug, and it started getting confused... then they discontinued development and support.
I'd also like Google Reader to come back
Solidworks ,Mentor Graphics's stuff etc....
AutoCad
Xilinx ISE and Quartus
Simics
Visual Studio
KiCAD is good enough at the moment so no real needs there.
eASIC's design suite (they want like 15k or something insane for it)
WinAMP
A decent drawing program ala Corel something something... (I have an artistic sister)
I don't need office... I just need people to stop using proprietary formats.
Soylent news loads so much faster. That site was started after they tried the "beta" layout.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
They are the doors of the internet and affect not only business but our entire life. They are too biased towards the pocket of a few extortionists that have created a non competition hell for anyone comming close to them.
Windows 7
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
The entire Strategic Simulations Inc catalog, from about 1980 to about 1999. There was a slew of excellent war games, plus a bunch of licensed Dungeons and Dragons games.
SSI changed hands a couple times, until Ubisoft acquired them and killed them off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In imagining the future computing world, I've always imagined it would include personal AI assistants. I never imagined that they wouldn't be running directly on my home computer and accessing the net as my proxy.
I believe the most critical open source need today is a strong AI assistant. Missing it is like missing the addition of Linux to open source.
Genetica
Unfortunately, the developers seem to have largely abandoned it, and no new work has been done on it in some time. The website it needs to connect to in order to download any needed content seems to be keeping maintained, but the forums, once booming with activity with questions from users and fast responses from the development team have all but dried up completely.
While it was once (and still is) commercial, open source seems to me like the only way that project can get any new life at this stage.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I have no interest in building or running the software... but I imagine reading the code comments would be hilarious and enlightening.
#DeleteChrome
AppleScript. I absolutely need AppleScript.
Apple has paid so little attention to AppleScript, at least in public recently, that I'm concerned that they might stop including it in macOS some day. I sure hope not.
If they do stop including AppleScript in macOS, I hope they'll open source it, so that people who need it can keep on using it.
Microsoft BASIC.
There are several z-machine clients out there for multiple platforms that are free or open source. People still make z-machine games, too. Also, Infocom have published a collection of basically every game they made, that might still be buyable somewhere. :)
Authorware was an interesting multimedia development tool by Macromedia, after the company was sold to Adobe it eventually was discontinued. It had a flowchart metaphor that allowed non-technical people to produce decent e-learning modules, including animations etc. In addition it had an interesting scripting language to create more powerful routines. I always thought that the program could have a future if maintained and expanded towards web based learning output etc (back then you could technically run it with a plug in, which nowadays would't be done anymore). It was quite a cool tool.
I would happily pay to have Snapseed open-sourced. I really like its effects / filters, but the fact the app is limited to Android and iOS is ridiculous. If it was open-sourced, I hope the effects / filters could be ported to a library which then could be used by GIMP or DigiKam.
CAD software! And not that fucked up shit from Autodesk that insists you have an account, and you must be logged in.
It is going to have a big impact if either or both of them get open sourced or reverse engineered.
After reading the other article, why not open source winamp? Surely it would be more useful than it is rotting away... Same for Picasa.
So we can finally add a compatibility mode for IE only corporate web apps to Firefox.
There's some IBM stuff that became abandonware when they sold it off to Nuance which makes it look like there's now nothing at all for download or money that will do speech to text on powerpc.
Otherwise, it's not open source. Donations are only meant to fill in the gaps and not to be used as motivation. If you want to get payed to be "creative," get a Patreon account.
I wrote one of those (in autolisp) some time around 1989. It was not hard for a single tool BUT how the code is interpreted by the device differs, so writing something that will work on everything requires access to everything and setting what device the output is intended for somewhere in the program.
There are some python DXF libraries that you could use as a starting point to write a G-code generator that would work on your stuff over a weekend. That's probably the only way you are going to get an open source G-code generator that works on your stuff.
Assange is translucent for a few minutes whenever he sheds his skin.
Unfortunately just having drivers for one chipset wouldn't help for long.
I would pay to have an entire company commit to making new, leading edge graphics cards with device drivers always and forever open sourced.
A lot of functionality which was earlier in android has been absorbed into the google apps. (ActiveSync support for example). Since this stuff is fundamental to many smartphones, i'd like to see it opensourced.
What part of Android isn't Open Source?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
1.ZTree. Its a clone of the old XTree file manager for dos except ZTree is a 32-bit Windows app with support for a bunch of windows things (copying to the clipboard, long file names and more). I use it all the time because it has ways to do things that would require a lot more effort to do using other methods and it would be good to see it updated to modern standards (e.g. make it 64 bit, add more features, stuff like that)
2.C&C Renegade from Westwood Studios. I have been reverse engineering C&C Renegade for more than 15 years and I probably know more about the internals of the game than anyone else on the planet at this point but there are still many holes in my knowledge. Having the original source code to Renegade (and the level editor, 3ds max export plugin and other tools) would allow all the mysteries of the engine to be sorted out once and for all.
3.Other C&C games from Westwood Studios and EA. Having the source code to the older games (C&C1, Red Alert 1, Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2 and maybe Generals) would allow the people who have been reverse engineering (or trying to reverse engineer) those games to stop doing that and work with the original code instead. Source code to console ports of the games (e.g. the Nintendo 64 port of the first C&C) would also be great to see.
4.LEGO Mindstorms RCX. I own the original yellow LEGO Mindstorms RCX brick. I would love to see the complete source code for everything that runs on the device as well as the complete source code to the drivers and software so it can be made to work on modern operating systems (Windows 7 in my case).
5.WinAmp. I still use it as my audio player of choice and if whoever owns it doesn't plan to continue development, opening it up and letting someone else take over would be nice.
Thanks for buying and killing it, Autodesk. Really. No. Actually, I can't hate you enough.
Silverlight with .NET Core and XAML based ui framework would be a great alternative to JS/HTML/CSS for rich browser based apps.
Wing Commander 1/2/3/4 Prophecy, Secret Ops, and of course Privateer. I'd like all the art assets made available so we can remaster 2,3 and Privateer in HD. The games' code is freaking useless, EA has no idea what they're doing with it. There will never be a great definitive edition of the series put on Good Old Games, just re-bundled versions of the DOS games. Open the code and let the community make proper cross platform ports and add weird features like VR support. It worked for Freespace 2 and there's a big enough Wing Commander community to make it work. EA obviously doesn't want to make a new game so why bother holding onto 27 year old sourcecode? The only other thing I really want Open Sourced is Caligari TrueSpace. The sourcecode got leaked onto the internet in 1998 but I can't find a copy of it anywhere (.NFO files indicate it was stolen and released). Microsoft bought out Caligari in 2008 and shut it down when the GFC hit. Sure TrueSpace is freeware now, but it's buggy and could do with a lot of patches/updates.
If you are still interested in Renegade, you should visit http://www.renegadeforums.com/ and look up the Tiberian Technologies scripts 4.4 update (its an unofficial patch for C&C Renegade written by me and some other people that adds new features, fixes bugs and does other good things)
Android is a not a real open source OS. A supposed open source OS should not have any closed source API.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
There is still no other LDAP directory close to it. Having a fully capable directory service available open source on Linux could change the game.
I miss After Dark screensavers so much...
I installed them in a Windows 98 virtual machine, but it's far from enough.
hemi
Sure, there is lots more software that needs to be open-sourced - but software is still light-years ahead of hardware in that respect. And really, the lack of open hardware hinders software development, especially in key areas such as phones. If the system contains any closed bits, then it isn't truly open. And only true, complete openness has a chance of saving us from the shit-show of corporate dominance, government spying, and general ass-fuckery the powers-that-be are subjecting us to.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Maybe if it was open source we could get Japanese input working on Linux.
I think Google Pagerank is what defines what most of us see whenever we search for something on the web. Being such an important gateway between someone and the information. Does it have biases? How much censorship does it do ? How many false positive happen for the spam filtering? and so many other questions.
I'm actually serious.
I thought about this, and my gut reaction is that I can't think of anything from a personal perspective to have open sourced. I am happy with Linux and the tools I have, even GIMP. There are a few things I use at work that I don't think I would really use at home, like Snag-It. Irfanview is something I always use as well, it's just a great all-around image viewer, screen capture, and image resizer.
But at work, we have an enterprise-level application that uses Silverlight a lot, and we have some VB6 apps as well. The next couple of years are going to be spent updating those, and as the manager of the testing group I am not looking forward to it at all. Save the comments for WHY we have those... we're a MS shop and those decisions pre-date me being there by many years. :)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I'd like to see many of the image and video format patents released to the public domain. I think that would stimulate a lot of new innovation. It sounds from various articles and events as if research in this area is strangled because of fears that a patent troll will bring an expensive lawsuit.
I am already using open source and Linux versions for pretty much everything I do.
I'm sure there are people that are comfortable using a certain application a certain way but even things like Photoshop and AutoCAD have gotten the entire kitchen sink worked into them (I started using AutoCAD 20 years ago and have abandoned it after early 2000 versions). Perhaps Eagle for PCB, there are few "good" Open Source PCB GUI although there are plenty of command line/parametric driven ones.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Just another vote for VMS and OS/2. Add Unix Sys V as well.
I'd pay towards opensourcing Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossfire.
In both cases include the externally and internally libraries and helper applications that go with it--not just the items written by the prime developer for the primary product.
- Sig
This would be the fastest road to get a GNU/Linux port.
Functionally we need a cross between iTunes and Plex. Something that will allow us to manage the physical files and the metadata like iTunes does. Also, something that will allow syncing between devices the way Plex does (wirelessly and from anywhere).
There was some really great things in that application, the interfacing and graphics capability was simply fantastic.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Open sourced or out-sourced to SE Asia.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I would love to see SGI open source IRIX. IRIX is a fantastic OS and it's graphics implementation would go far to really improve the graphic capability of Linux and BSD.
Creation or whatever branding they've given it. It must be the most Frankenstein style, cobbled together engine ever used to power AAA games. I would put good money on there being more TODO and HACK comments in that source than actual lines of code.
Affinity Designer
Affinity Photo
Corel Draw
The Fusion Video Suite (professional video postproduction software, hideously expensive)
Kaleidoskope App (diff tool for macOS)
Transmit (FTP Client for macOS)
everything from Jetbrains (developer tools)
Adobes entire Flash related line of software
Games: ... Old school arena games desperately needed! ... Probably Watchdogs 1&2 or the entire GTA line including servers.
Everything related to the line of "Tribes" games
Eve Online
WoW + Server
StarCraft 1&2
GuildWars 1&2 + Server
Dota 2
MineCra(ft/ck)
Some line of open world games,
That's from the top of my head.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Windows XP + IE11. It's still a wonderful OS.
It's owned by HPE now.
Too bad it got killed when Macromedia was acquired by Adobe. FreeHand was a nice vector drawing tool.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
I don't write many documents anymore with the change in jobs but when I had to before I always preferred writing in WordPerfect because I found it easier to see what was going on with the reveal codes section when I had to fix something that wasn't working right. The reveal codes section made it easy to see everything that was going on in the document.
Seconded. They don't even need to open source the software, just publish the specs for the hardware and bitstream.
Nullius in verba
or print
Nullius in verba
Game never worked, but have some promising features. Let the community fix it!
I'd love to see this fantastic game open sourced so that I could run it without Windows or Wine
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
...no 'democracy' is not an adequate replacement.
Requiem for the American Dream
Actually, Stallman hates the word "open source." I'm not anit-money, I just think you have a bunch of young college students that got duped into being computer science majors and now that everyone's a "developer" and the popular thing is "open source," 20 year olds that don't understand the philosophy and origins want to get paid for it when they could be developing proprietary software & PC games and just let those that actually care about a FOSS project do what they do best. Your allusion to 1984 Soviet Union is also innacurrate and probably has to do with your millenial mind-set and the book "1984." In the Soviet Union, science and technology were very heavily linked to politics and ideology (much like in the U.S. today). They may have all been driving tanks for cars, but they were kicking ass in computers and engineering, especially Japan. Poor East Germany didn't get a break though. Even the U.S. space program was built on Nazi tech and scientists. So...I'll just take what you said as a compliment.
I learned to dictate with a human secretary more years ago than I care to contemplate. Dragon was an easy transition for me and I love it. I would love to see a good FOSS speech-to-text program. Nothing compares to Dragon. Android's speech to text is passable, but often fails in hilarious (and dangerous) ways.
GIMP vs PS. User of PS since 1.0 so it is almost instinctive. When PS went to subscription in a fit of pique I decided to undergo the pain of learning the unfortunately-named G.I.M.P. I find it quirky, but usable and flexible once it's counter-intuitive eccentricities are mastered. I will allow that my PS experience may bias my perception. I will also allow that there are things about GIMP that I like better. "Crop to selection" comes to mind.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Anonymous Coward #55050609 wrote, with a link to Krita:
You're doing it wrong.
A presumably different Anonymous Coward #55050697 wrote:
Also Serif Photo. It is paid, but it is at a price of a dinner for 2
When I tried to look up its price to verify the claim of "a price of a dinner for 2", the first result for serif photo on Google Search was Serif PhotoPlus. I assumed that "Serif Photo" was a colloquial abbreviation for Serif PhotoPlus. The Serif PhotoPlus page states that the Serif PhotoPlus product has been discontinued in favor of Affinity Photo. So I instead looked up the price of Affinity Photo and wrote in reply to Anonymous Coward #55050697:
Now called Affinity, and priced at $50.
You wrote:
What does that mean? Krita is not Affinity.
That's why I replied to Anonymous Coward #55050697, who suggested the predecessor of Affinity Photo, not Anonymous Coward #55050609, who suggested Krita.
There's really no replacement for it, and Adobe's pretty much abandoned it.
It's one of the few things keeping some people on Windows... I second the comments above on Photoshop and AutoCAD... basically, anything that's preventing people from switching away from closed-source OS.
Echelon
Painter here. Yes, that kind of painter.
While a poor painter may blame his brushes, a good painter knows that he's no better than the brushes he uses. A great deal of painters try to imitate Bob Ross with poorer quality paints and brushes (i.e. something other than the Bob Ross branded paints and brushes), and only end up frustrated. I'm one of those - Bob's knife techniques simply don't work with acrylics. He eventually comes around to mentioning this in one of his episodes, but that's years of time under the bridge.
I spent several years painting with "traditional" oil paint brushes, using acrylics, and ended up very frustrated with the limitations. But a few years ago, I discovered golden taklon brushes, and it was the difference between night and day. There are simply things you can't do with hog hair brushes, and no amount of skill will compensate for that.
There are a lot of amateur artists who remain amateurs, I suspect, because they don't have sense enough to buy good quality art supplies. They think, "If only I were skilled enough, I could do this right," instead of, "If I want the results of a great master, I have to use the same tool a master uses..." And sadly, they often give up, thinking they lack some fundamental talent necessary. More often than not, it's a matter of time and materials rather than talent.
Think of it another way: most of us could write in assembly if we needed, but why would we do that if C/C++/Java was available? If we insist on having the best tools available, why wouldn't a painter do the same?
And I have tried GIMP. Yes, I could use it for painting, but why? I'd spent less time doing it the traditional way, on canvas.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I know there are "alternatives" foss and non-foss but sadly enough there are too many stencils already done. To recreate must deal with too much annoyances... so opensource of MS Visio will really simplify TI people and non-TI people a lot!
This could be the basis for a AR world crowd-sourced SLAM database.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff798293.aspx
Civ 4 is one of my all-time favorite games and I still play online games of it to this day. After 10+ years of playing, I'm still discovering new game mechanics and new strategies. For those who don't follow civ, civs 1-4 consisted of a gradual expansion of concepts in each sequel, with tried-and-true mechanics being preserved, flawed mechanics being re-worked, and new mechanics building on top. This approach allowed the series to evolve and continue to improve with each iteration. Then came Civ 5 which abandoned most of the classic civ game mechanics and started fresh with a slate of new (and inferior, poorly balanced) mechanics. The predictable result was that Civ5 was a disaster. With Civ6, the designers have resumed a more evolutionary process, keeping the core of Civ5 but making significant improvements. Civ6 is pretty good but still no where near as good or deep as Civ4. I've always wished that civ4 would go open source so that a series of games could preserve and build-upon that lineage.
Shiftnrg, filecoin, sia...
IBM OS/2 Warp and later would be great--even the assembler source code. We can rehost it in C and enjoy an operating system stable enough for automatic teller machines.
Kriston
I would like to see a Windows XP/7 "desktop environment" with Linux underneath. It would get rid of many Windows file system and OS shortcomings while giving us a very usable and simple to use OS. So simple and so "unobtanium", eh? :( Although I must admit I really love MATE DE and it could become just what I'm asking for really soon. Almost there.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
While we're in ancient history, Vern Buerg's LIST, v9.final.
LIST v6.0 source code was released as public domain, but good luck finding a copy; it seems to have vanished off the planet (tho I have one stashed on an old HD somewhere).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I would love to see what the community can do with Kerbal Space Program