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Open Source
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
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- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
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- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
- !libre_culture@lemmy.ml
- !libre_software@lemmy.ml
- !libre_hardware@lemmy.ml
- !linux@lemmy.ml
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Another good email client. Many are trying to leave Thunderbird on GNU Linux but there aren't many to choose from.
Why? Thunderbird announced it is not adopting the Firefox EULA.
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.
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.
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.
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)
I run grapheneos since a couple of years and I love it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Openly available traffic data that follows a reliable standard.
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.
Tax software. It's the only reason I keep a windows VM.
Yeah, as a past tax accountant, I wouldn't count on it.
Because not only would you need to be updating tax regulation every year (which is completely unpredictable with new laws and interpretations) you would also need to update it for every country and state/providence.
No one should do that for free.
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.
Hi! My partner is a middle school band teacher. I have been trying to find anything that is music related for her so I can help her classroom workflow.
Any recommendations? Because I honestly can't find anything good. I will check out Sheetable soon.
Sadly, neither have I- in the closed source world there’s stuff like Soundslice which is pretty good but nothing really open source
Idk if there's a os music sheet software somewhere but if someone know one i am interested
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.
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.
Joining an existing project would be more helpful.