What projects does the opensource world lack

Nothing and everything.

There are thousands if not millions of open source solutions scattered around society. Some are feature complete, most are not. Some are maintained, many are not. A handful are funded, the rest is not.

What open source needs, more than anything else is fundraising and the means to distribute those funds to the tune of the trillions of dollars that the corporate world extracts in profits from those open source efforts.

In other words, the people who make this need to get paid.

Firefox terms and conditions, Red Hat, and several other projects that have caused uproar through the community, are all caused by the need to get paid to eat food and have a roof over your head whilst you contribute to society and give away your efforts.

I 100% agree with this what we need is a centralized store like steam that is a non-profit. Where they make it easy just to buy the software. I love distros as much as the next person but having it centralized between all distros gets people paid. My only concern is how do we get the devs of libraries used by those apps use paid. And yes i know it sounds crazy it's open source how can you charge? Nothing in free and open source says you have to not charge. You just have to given them the source when you do so.

Even if someone can build it themselves for free. If you make the store a great experience to use. People will just buy. It's likely this i can go out and pirate any games I want. So from a monetary perspective it's the same. With a little work I could have my games for free but steam is so good i just buy the game.
- I know micropayments is a bad word, but a centralized nonprofit where I could pay 50$ a month to distribute amongst projects I use and their dependencies would be great. Disregarding any privacy concerns of course, as they would have to track all or most of the applications I use and for how long.
- Perhaps a model like itch.io offers. Each product can set a price or have a "pay what you want" model. I feel some would be more likely to give money if it's right up front.
  
  But the biggest part that I think we need, is a centralized location, store or not. Sometimes it's hard to find if an open source alternative even exists because it could be on Github, Gitlab, Codeberg, etc.

games! in maybe 95% of cases you can find an open alternative to some (non-game) software, but with games it's the opposite.

i would say that the main proprietary softwares i still use, are video games

Disclaimer: I have no qualifications or really any business talking about this...

I think games aren't the best kind of projects for open source. Some games are made open source after development ends which is cool because it opens up forks and modding (pixel dungeon did this). Most games require a single, unified, creative vision which is hard to get from an "anyone can help" contribution style. Most open source software are tools for doing specific things. It's almost objective what needs to be done to improve the software while games are much more opinionated and fuzzy. So many times I've seen a game's community rally behind a suggestion to address a problem and the developer ignores them and implements a better idea to more elegantly solve it. Most people aren't game designers but they feel like they could be.

An exception to this are certain, rules-based puzzly games. Bit-Burner is an open source hacking game with relatively simple mechanics and it works well.
- Open source doesn't mean anyone can contribute
Try Veloren and Anarch! Lots of fun to be had.
- Intereating, this? Never heard of it before: https://drummyfish.itch.io/anarch
Games have a very high barrier to entry though with many different parts, so that may be the reason?
- StarCraft would not be so hard to make. But nobody did that, even though 0 AD exists to clone age of empires 2
  
  It even works as a 2D game so no modeling experience necessary

A. Phone.

Android is open-source, I thought.
- Only Android Open Source Project, not the different phone UIs, vendor blobs, firmware, camera apps, etc... It is really the basics that are open source.
  
  But also the source of android is 100% controlled by google unless it is an alternative forked project like lineageOS (at least I think so)
- android yes, but the entire google play ecosystem is not, and some things are very hard to do without being inside that ecosystem.
  
  I'm using my fairphone without any google account (so no play store), and it works, but there are some obstacles. Luckily my bank still offers a good website and even uses some international standard for 2 factor auth, so i can do my ebanking without the app - which, like most companies, is only offered in the play store.
  
  for public transport, i downloaded the app from apkpure (in hindsight, the aurora store would likely be the better option) and it works fine for buying tickets. this is just my lazyness, i could buy tickets on the website (but it sucks) or at ticket machines, but the app is super convenient.
  
  for various other services i just refuse to install apps. parking payments, my insurance company, work (luckily i have a bunch of freedom at work, using linux on my work laptop too)... is all stuff that would be convenient but it's all just available in play store. it looks like aurora is a good option, but 1. i don't know how long until google kills it and 2. i want to completely stop being dependent on adtech anyway.
- That's not untrue but phones are complex, requiring lots of components and drivers to work together, so it's hard to get a fully free phone.
Fairphone comes pretty close.
@frightful_hobgoblin @0101100101

Very needed

A mesh network internet, it's more of a hardware, security, and adoption problem but at this point there's enough wifi overlap in most residential areas that entire towns could have their own local internet without needing the ISP model at all.

Berlin's C-Base were working on mesh about fifteen years ago for Berlin - you could check out c-base.org

The EU managed to get Meta on their knees with GDPR. They could force unlocked bootloader and easy install of any OS on phones just like on laptop/pc. I believe then we would really get the Linux phone movement going. Imagine: iPhone with UBports.

A project to give me money in exchange for me writing software.

Have you checked out NLNet?

It is an European Agency that funds you to write FOSS software based on a project/idea you submit to them
- yeah denied lol
Liberapay
The post open project maybe?.One day perhaps.

A high performance RISC-V CPU core.

Jim Keller is now working on one. I kind of doubt it will be FOSS, though.
- Yeah I have no hope for an American FOSS design.
  
  Perhaps an EU-backed one might appear at some point.
  
  Recently I stumbled upon a Chinese team working on a FOSS pair of cores, with source in GitHub. I think they were aiming at competing with A76 and N2. Supposedly they're well underway.
  
  Found it
  
  If these guys (or any others) tape out a competitive FOSE chip, it'll change the world. If it's a decent project, everyone and their mother will fork it. And we'll get chips that cost just a bit over the silicon and packaging cost.
Hear, Hear

Most anything related to healthcare:

System for medics and nurses to input all the data of a patient, which can be accessed by said patient if need be
System for keeping track of vaccines applied and pinging people who need to take more shots (second dose, reinforcement dose, etc)
drivers and programs to interact with medical equipment

there’s actually a bunch of these, but healthcare tends to fall prey to “too much money, too many consultants, fancy brochures”
Healthcare normally have tight varying legal requirements that software must adhere to, so I would say there couldn't be a single solution for multiple countries.
https://www.gnumed.de/documentation/
- Gonna take a look at that one. Data migration from a 10+ years program would definitely be the second biggest pain, number one would be training staff to use it, but i do think it'd be worth it

At the minute, a true open source and free browser/web engine, though I know this is nigh impossible to maintain without thousands of people. Some part of me is hopeful though given recent events.

They exist. Firefox and chromium are open source. Big companies pay their dev costs but they can be forked. Chromium is a descendent of WebKit which is a descendent of khtml from the KDE project. The engines have been open source for decades It's the proprietary crap they put on top which is the problem.
https://ladybird.org/ is pretty cool, tho it definitely needs more work

A fitness tracker app that rivals Strava.

Also can't find anything good for Macros
Try FitoTrack. I've been using it for awhile, measurements are very close to what Strava records. It does lack the social element though
Ooh that's a great idea, maybe I should get on it 🤓
On iOS I’m using OutRun. It provides basic activity tracking, which is what I care about. I don’t need a social network.

It’s open source: https://github.com/timfraedrich/OutRun

A printer or printer firmware. There was a discussion about this elsewhere on lemmy, of course this would be difficult and expensive but it would be very cool

Some of the OLD HP Thinkjet printers were pretty rudimentary; the original Thinkjet cartridges are still widely manufactured for certain industrial applications. Tell me we couldn't reprap that shit.
- A reprap style project could probably make a passable document printer- but what's the appeal? People only work on those projects to make new or previously unobtainable machines available.
  
  I just don't think it'd be worth the effort.
The biggest issue I see is that most of the tech is someone's IP. If it's not patented, it's copyrighted or trademarked. Otherwise, it should be a doable PoC with old parts and a barebones firmware. I don't need my FOSS printer to contend with Xerox, I just need it to poop out a page when I hit print.

I'd also love to see a FOSS page description language that could dethrone Adobe's PostScript and HP's PCL as the standards.

for me the most critical ones are replacements for discord and microsoft teams. for discord the critical piece is the login - people don't want to make accounts on each server, so until we have proper federation with a good user experience people won't actually move off it.

for teams i'm sure theres projects in development, i just don't know them or their status - all i know is that i want a project to combine several specialized FOSS services (jitsi is great, and there's lots of other collaboration tools for email/calendar/chat) into one nice unified frontend that is actually reasonably easy to self-host and maintain.

Discourse

Zulip
Have you tried element?
- The problem with Element as it compares to discord in my experience of showing it to discord-heavy users is that it does not contain the feature set that they are seeking.
  
  Discords roles and permissions abilities, multiple channel types, streaming capabilities, public bots that are easily joinable, profile customization features, moderation capabilities, and more have no real equivalent in Matrix/element. Hence, when I have shown it to discord users before, they have 0 interest in using it because for them it is like reverting to an IRC.
Was about to point you to MatterMost but saw it's not open source, doh! Anyone know if it was and switched? Or was it always closed source?

Edit: Turns out it was and still is open source, I just apparently suck at researching.
- Mattermost does have an Github Repository with a choice of three licenses: MIT (if using versions compiled by them), AGPLv3 (if compiled by you) or an Enterprise license. I would count that as open source.
- @houseofleft https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
people don’t want to make accounts on each server, so until we have proper federation

I've shit on matrix a lot but this is something it does well.

It you're looking for ideas-- Something you're passionate about. Find a problem you're having, fix it, and make it open source. That's the best way to make sure whatever you do doesn't get abandoned. Good luck

Sometimes you get into skill issue, or time issues. I make some softwares that I need, but I don't have advertising skills to make people use it.

And sometimes I want to make something, but I don't have the necessary skills.

For example I'd like a local filesharing option. Where a single folder would be synced in my phone from home computer when I'm at home, and from work computer and phone when I'm at work. Without using cloud sync between them only when I'm physically traveling between them, that's good enough for most use cases of cloud sync that I want for work.

Openly available traffic data that follows a reliable standard.

Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin could use some help

what's up with Lemmy? Seems to be doing great
- Things can be good from the consumption side. But the developers are often working long extra hours to make that happen. If we want to escape capitalism ever, we need to think of the human element.
- multicommunities
  
  !languagesettings@lemmy.zip
  
  being able to completely block instances at the user level rather than just mute the communities

I'm always surprised that, for as widely used as PDFs are, there doesn't seem to be any real alternative to Acrobat for editing existing PDFs.

i've had good success doing small edits with libreoffice (design? draw? idk what its called).
- that or Inkscape are the only real answers I'd have if you forced me to name one, but I'd have a hard time recommending a vector graphics editor to a regular person who just wants to edit text formatting in a PDF without messing it up.
Stirling PDF may have what you need https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF

Tax software. It's the only reason I keep a windows VM.

I considered an accounting SaaS once. Only once though. The amount of constantly changing regulations would make it a very high maintenance project.
- And have you ever read the forms? I don't know if writing the software could be seen as tax advice or filing on behalf of someone.
  
  Probably not. But its enough that I wouldn't be interested in working on the project.

I would really like to see something like Jellyfin/Komga but for sheet music. There’s a software in early development called Sheetable that stores it in PDF format, but I really want to see something that has MusicXML support so that sheets can be played back.

MuseScore Studio can open .XML and .MXL files, if that's what you mean.
- It can, and it’s quite good! But I mean something more like a self hostable archive.

Idk if there's a os music sheet software somewhere but if someone know one i am interested

MuseScore?
- Or to be specific as of late, "MuseScore Studio." There have been... a lot of company changes over the past 2 years...
If you'd like something LaTeX-like (best for transscribing rather than composing), then there's LilyPond.

I have no clue yet if an open source solution exists, but I'm just getting started volunteering with a local animal rescue, and they definitely need a better solution for records management.

A more general business management application like Odoo could work?
- Thanks! Looks interesting. Might be a bit awkward to fit the data types, but I'm definitely curious to play with it and see how it compares to the other ERPs I've experienced, which were also clunky, even with more typical business data.
It's a shame that doesn't exist yet. I was in your position for a horse charity 25 years ago and couldn't find anything either. I ended up writing them such a system, which grew and grew. Sadly it was owned by them and replaced a couple of years ago.

Is sheltermanager not suitable for self hosting? They claim to be open source
- Thank you! This particular issue is something that I only started to become aware of a few days ago, so I'm still trying to learn more before pushing for any big changes. I don't know that self hosting is even the right solution for our group, so I'm glad to see that they also offer a hosted option, although the self hosted option seems like a great way for me to test it out.
- Of they've replaced it they might be open to the idea of freeing up the source code?

A Wayland reimplementation of XMonad.

There's work being done on it, but from my understanding, it's slow going...

I've been wanting to try to leave Windows for Linux, but I just can't find a replacement for AutoHotkey that can do everything that it can. It would have to be some kind of weird combination of various Python libraries, AutoKey, and Espanso, and even then it's either not as easy or downright convoluted at best.

I also can't find any FOSS image editor that can do this.

I think that it never happened because folks find the power in bash scripts instead and different desktops can't be automated the same anyway.
- About the only UI automation I need is KeePass auto-type.
SikuliX
- Wow, fascinating!!! I don't know how I couldn't find any tool like this! Thanks, this may be a game changer!
I use hyprland and can bind stuff through their config, whether that is some library functions or executing a script i wrote. I'm sure there are other ways to do similar with different desktop environments.
Interesting - what features are you using to have to need that?
- AutoHotkey, it's navigation through programs by hotkey-invoked series of smart, self-changing mouse clicks and keystrokes, though it can also do math and launch programs or put the focus on windows in specific ways. For example, I have a dynamic, template-based, weekly, ~60-slide PowerPoint builder whose clicks and keystrokes change across the screen depending on what the content is. One AHK GUI I built lets you specify how to proceed using a base template I made + a spreadsheet with data from week to week.
  
  I also have a URL-cleaning script that deletes all my known trackers when pasting, does URL-decoding, etc. AHK can even check for images on screen and click them or wait to proceed (like wait for the browser to finish loading before taking action, etc.). I've got a bunch of various scripts and have not found any cross-platform tool as remotely as easy + capable.
  
  However, thanks to your post and another Lemmy denizen, I now know of SikuliX! I'll check that out...

Joining an existing project would be more helpful.

I'd like a local filesharing option. Where a single folder would be synced in my phone from home computer when I'm at home, and from work computer and phone when I'm at work. Without using cloud sync between them only when I'm physically traveling between them, that's good enough for most use cases of cloud sync that I want for work.

So just sync over local wifi basically? I'm pretty sure you can do thing with syncthing if you just disable "global discovery". You can read the local discovery protocol here https://docs.syncthing.net/specs/localdisco-v4.html but afaiu there is no cloud sync involved at that point and just device to device sync.
- Perfect, it looks like the thing I want. Hopefully it can do multiple devices in different networks. I'll test it out when I can.
  
  Thank you :)

Something similar to splitwise.

I have not used it much, but https://spliit.app/ is pretty good
- Thanks. This looks promising. I want few more minor features but I can easily add them. Thanks again.

DNS management. Think something like InfoBlox where I can have GUI driven control from simple adding a new zone record all the way up to full anycast configuration.

I love the terminal and CLIs to death but zone files suck and setting up bind or unbound/nsd is more painful than it should be.

I have a decent web UI based DNS (and other stuff) management if you'd like to give it a try.

I'm running Netbox as the main tool Coupled with the DNS plugin With a cron job running OctoDNS with octodns-netbox as data source, and zone transfer to my local Unbound server for resolution and cloudflare for public DNS.

It was a bit of work to setup but I didn't have any issues with it so far.

A manga chapter/volume manager similar to sonarr/radarr/readarr that can download with or similar to fmd2/hdoujin downloader/mihon

Something lime this: https://apps.gnome.org/en/Komikku/ ?
- Interesting, I havent heard of this one before! Its more of a single device type app rather than a selfhosted server like sonarr, but it looks interesting none the less
Would this work for your use case?

https://github.com/Casvt/Kapowarr
- Unfortunately not, that is only for western comics and doesn't work with manga. It is very close though!

Open source language learning only has Anki. Everything else is in an enbryonic stage.

There are so many low hanging fruits. Add-on to look up words in subtitles and add it to Anki. Luo dingo clone that's a bit less tedious (without having to write so much of your native language). Clozemaster clone (unless someone knows how to set up Anki to do this)

100% agree, would like to see more stuff in this space. Do you have any links to more "enbryonic tools". I recall seeing another tool awhile ago that I tested (can't remember the name) that worked a bit like LingQ. It would run a webserver and you could read links through it and mark words you didn't understand. I couldn't really get into a flow using it as tool to learn languages.
- You're talking about learning with texts
  
  It's not great for languages like Korean where you might have a lot of different conjugations that will be detected as new words
See I just started getting into learning another language and like most people I just downloaded Duolingo. But now on YouTube everybody recommends Anki. Over anything else I mean also immersion but like Anki is the go-to so I think Open source won

Proper 3D CAD software, we have FreeCAD but it isn't very good.

This is niche, but I really want a good FOSS screenwriting software that can rival Highland. There are some options like Trelby and others (because the Fountain syntax makes interchangeable screenplay files possible) but right now none of them are as good as Highland. A good alternative could let me finally leave Apple

Not FOSS but Fadein supports Linux and I have no problems with it
- TY! I'll give that one another look. Can it export .fountain?

opensource

Still two words.

Sometimes a hyphenated adjective

I would love to see a non-proprietary desktop music player. Just something simple that I can listen to my MP3s with. Audacity is great, but it’s a PITA when it comes to casual listening.

/s. As sbv Said in another comment, I think it’s best to join an existing project. Loops has potential to rival TikTok but it’s still not in a state I would use.

Edit: I could have placed the /s a bit better to flag my surreal sense of humour. I was joking about FOSS lacking a desktop music player, because there seem to be hundreds of them. I use Audacity for editing, not listening to mp3s :)

There are more than I ever wanted to know:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_player_software
- We can go further
You got Fooyin as a viable, and even really good, open alternative to Foobar2k.
Audacity is not a music player, but a music editor. Aren't there countless desktop music players you can use?
Just something simple that I can listen to my MP3s with.

You mean like foobar2000? I don't know much about fully FOSS players, but foobar is free

Leadership: What is important, what redundant projects should be joined or axed and their developers merged.

Ahh yes, consolidation and centralization, core pillars of the FOSS movement.
- Maybe it should be.