So in the spirit of this community and not just to focus on the Reddit... issues... I thought it might be nice to get a topical conversation going in here.
Basically, what open source projects are you currently working on or are you heavily involved with?
I think it would be nice to see what projects people have on the go, get some publicity out there and otherwise talk about stuff that we should be discussing here.
I contribute to Umbraco every so often because we use it at work and think they should get some help because it's been really useful for us. The community is very friendly and the devs are appreciative of good quality pull requests.
Some projects are kind of underwhelming. You can watch your PR you spent multiple nights on go completely unnoticed, without even a "thanks, we're getting around to checking this." I don't mind when it's some guy with a hobby project but I'm talking about projects run by companies.
I might look at Lemmy soon. I've been looking to help with something I actually have some personal stake in. It's hard to put effort in when you don't use it.
Umbraco is a fantastic open source project, as well as a great example of how open source can support a profitable company as well, through support, training, and certification programs.
I don't use it as much these days, as its not part of my day job, and for my hobby projects I'm using static site generators, I appreciate what Umbraco has, and how they do it. It really is great software, for users and developers.
It set my expectations a little too high I'd say! I really appreciate how they turned it into a profitable product too and it shows they have commitment to service when most of their secret sauce can be used by anyone.
I think they now have a headless version called Heartcore but, as far as I know, it's a proprietary SaaS solution. Shame, that might have been of interest to you otherwise. I also use static site generators personally, it's less to worry about.
I am building a project within the Fediverse. I believe in the fediverse but the gatekeeping and HOA behaviour gets tiring. So, I’m building a project that is open to all kinds of users. Those that want a more comprehensive user experience similar to what they got with big social without all of the ick and those that largely like things they way they are but want a better UI.
Few times a week i do some editing or writing comments within OpenStreetMap. I see the whole task as a game, results being implemented & used for people in need. Good feelings afterwards.
Focus on your neighborhood & community, as it continues to change, if you want to participate. Few weeks later changes are implemented into Organic Maps as example.
Organic Maps is my main navigation app past approx 3 years now. Have all my places bookmarked within it. It's not the best navigation app, but i am optimistic because the dev team are doing plentiful. Meanwhile the progress can be followed at their GitHub page.
Yeah I'm really excited! OsmAnd obviously has a foothold and is a swiss army knife of GPS stuff, but I don't think I'll ever be able to recommend it to my friends and family. Whereas with OM the developers seem open to accomplishable FOSS privacy-respecting improvements while keeping things simple and usable, so I have hope that I can help nudge it in the right direction.
I do the same, but through the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. Helps those in need from natural disasters, getting access to vaccines, or whatever else.
I work on Apache Superset for my day job, it's a BI tool for data exploration and visualization. It's a big project with 100+ committers, so a lot of the challenges are about managing people and communicating effectively.
DJ is a "metrics platform that allows users to define metrics and the data models behind them using SQL, serving as a semantic layer on top of a physical data warehouse." The project is still in its infancy but growing fast.
My favorite project is shillelagh, a Python library that lets you query APIs using SQL, eg:
SELECT *
FROM "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_rN3lm0R_bU3NemO0s9pbFkY5LQPcuy1pscv8ZXPtg8/edit#gid=0"
My claim to fame is probably OctoPrint, a web interface for consumer 3d printers that I created over a decade ago now and have been maintaining ever since, since 2014 full time and since 2016 also 100% crowd funded. It's written in Python (backend) and HTML/JS (frontend) and licensed under AGPLv3.
SLA printing sucks I agree, the software on the SLA side is absolute trash. The only exception is PrusaSlicer which does have SLA support, but only for Prusa's official machines. However, there is a workaround - customize the Prusa machine profile to fit your machine and then convert the output file with UVTools (the other great FOSS SLA printing tool). These two tools make SLA printing tolerable.
Yeah, I've been looking into that too. Currently, I am using LycheeSlicer, but it is a downgrade from what I was used to. I really hope one day we will have a nice open source printer like i3 that will help SLA get to the same level as FDM, but I remain skeptical.
OctoPrint is good stuff. I don't always have it set up as I usually just use SD cards with my Ender 3, but I appreciate the work that's gone into OctoPrint. It is a nice interface for 3D printing and the plugin system is great, especially the bed leveling plugin.
Thanks! 😊 I consider the plugin system one of my best ideas - it's causing me a ton of grey hair, but it also has allowed people to implement stuff that I'd never could have dreamed of and/or been able to merge in core. And I don't have to maintain all of that either 😂
Oh nice, I still have my OctoPrint server set up on my Raspberry Pi attached to the other side of my Ender-3 (which has sat neglected for a couple of years I'm sad to say). Was really happy when I discovered it as it made using the printer so much better than constantly running back and forth with my USB stick.
Hah, that is awesome! I originally wrote it because I was annoyed of having to keep the printer tethered to my PC and pray that a Windows update would not kill my print job - that was before SD cards let alone USB sticks became the norm, so it was even worse 😅 It has since taken over my life 😬
Well glad to say that I for one think it has been worth it, its a really nice tool and I think I would have given up using the printer in frustration long ago without it. The plugin system is really useful to add functionality too (I can't remember the name now but I have a screen on the PI so I can control the printer without using the main controls or having to use my PC).
Oh I was just listening to a podcast where you were a guest in https://pod.fossified.com/2023/04/05/s01e03.html and I had to lough out loud when they asked you what they could do to bring more women into FOSS or what it was and your response was to not invite them to podcasts only to discuss the topic of women in FOSS :D
For the last 6 months I have been working on a completely open flight stick design. Just me working on it. DIY hotas sticks is a pretty damn niche hobby.
6 axis, 32 button, based on the MiG31 design, with a front panel on the base (on this design).
Not the most cost efficient vs quality as everything is 3D printed. Honestly it is my second big 3D modeling design and it was a pretty complicated one to get right. Ran into a lot of FreeCAD bugs. First time working with libopenCM3 also, so much less bloated than STM HAL. Plenty of improvements to come once it is released.
I'm planning on writing a wrapper for Podman and systemd to make it possible to use kubectl commands to deploy and maintain applications. The idea is a middleground between Podman (or Docker) to real Kubernetes like k3s...
Not sure if anyone (even me) would find it interesting or useful. But a good excuse to learn more Go.
My thoughts as well. Podman + systemd is a really solid combination for small scale deployments like homelabs, abstracting it a bit would make it even more approachable.
A music playout system. I put on an internet radio-like show each week and I needed a way to play music. The only solutions I could find were for Windows but my desktops are all Linux so I wrote my own.
It differs a bit from the more usual "music player". I need to know how long until the track ends and how long until it starts to fade out. I also want to add lots of comments so that I can talk about the tracks I'm playing.
Over time I've added other features - tabbed playlists, automatic lookup of titles on Wikipedia, estimated start/end times for tracks I've yet to play, ability to edit mp3 tags and - well, quite a lot more. It's just grown over time as I've needed things.
I call it MusicMuster, but I haven't actually open sourced it yet. I mean to, but imposter syndrome keeps popping up. I'll just make the code a bit better, remove that hack, etc. Maybe you know how it is.
I don't think they're like some grand solution or something but I like the way they move us (less dependence on the rich donating money and more emphasis on helping the community). That being said, there is a lot of "green washing" type organizations that try to use the label without living up to it.
So far just contributing to other projects whenever I find something, missing. My main project that I am currently starting to work on is a Wayland Tiling Compositor written in Rust, but so far I am still in very early stages. I really like how Wayland works but so far all the compositors are lacking something I want, closest to what I want is DWL, but it still lacks some things I want.
OpenRGB, it's an open source application to control RGB lighting on PC components and peripherals, smart lights, and more. It started as an attempt to reverse engineer ASUS Aura because I wanted to control my motherboard lighting in Linux and then I went on to add more and more devices and an API to unify them, then the community blew it up into what it is today with effects plugins and third party apps.
To make a start I'm currently part of the Pulsar Edit team which is a community of like minded people that came together after the sunset of the Atom text editor to fork and improve it and get it up to date.
The project is almost a year old now as we are are just a few days off the anniversary of the above sunsetting blog post.
In what feels like a much shorter amount of time that it has been, we managed to get the entire (closed source) package backend re-implemented, get a website and documentation site up and running, get a whole bunch of improvements to the neglected Atom project going and generally having a great time interacting with the community who came together in the spirit of open source.
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