- You can choose up to 10 software projects.
- Each project receives 10 years of development time as if all the programmers worked continuously for that duration, following their current working methods.
- After choosing these 10 (or less) projects, everything else remains unchanged in the world, as if time has been frozen for 10 years.
Which projects do you choose?
I would give it all to BOINC !boinc@sopuli.xyz. I donate time and money to this project on a regular basis, but I wish more people knew about BOINC because projects like this give me faith in humanity. BOINC is a open source tool scientists can use to distribute massive computational workloads to the computers of volunteers. Any scientist can use it without institutional backing or approval, it’s an open network operating on the petaflop scale. Users can choose which projects they compute for.
BOINC has been used for medical research, finding new asteroids, and identifying new particles at the Large Hadron Collider. Anybody remember seti@home? Ran on BOINC. BOINC was also used to make the first accurate 3D model of the sars-cov-2 spike protein and even helped lead to the design of a shelf-stable vaccine which was distributed to millions. Plus, the project Minecraft@home used it to find the tallest cactus. BOINC has resulted in hundreds of scientific papers that without BOINC would never have gotten funded due to the cost and complexity of the computation involved.
But there is some serious technical debt and usability issues and BOINC has a long-term trend of declining userbase.
Proton/WINE. I never want to have issues playing games without windows ever again.
Signal: Because I want better messaging, and somehow they already achieved some adoption.
Firefox: If Firefox can somehow make their browser miles ahead of chrome, I think that’d be just plain good for the world.
Gitea/Forgejo: I think Github is another one of these centralized platforms that’s pretty ripe for disruption (and gitlab is just not gonna do it).
Lemmy: It’d be amazing to have all the kinks ironed out of lemmy.
Mastodon: Same thing as lemmy. Get social media out of the hands of big companies.
Mail-in-a-box: I want to be able to host my own email if I want to. Proton is great, but isn’t email supposed to be an open standard?
Framework: Not exactly a software project, but man I’d love to see them get the time to push out a ton of great different products and really spark the right to repair movement. It’s the first device I was actually excited to buy.
Linux Mint: I don’t use mint, but it seems like one of the most user friendly distros. I would love for them to make everything perfect and create a seamless experience (and really make a year of the linux desktop). I also think it would be great to just have one clear frontrunner for new users.
Coreboot: Make firmware open source? Yes please.
Truly Open Source LLM: I really don’t want this tech to be in just the hands of just a big company. I’d love for there to be an LLM that has not only it’s weights open, but the full dataset, training methods and everything open.
I think when you just get 10 years of dev time, you get an opportunity to push a project ahead of all it’s competitors. It is kind of interesting to get to pick and choose a project to be the frontrunner (even if they aren’t currently).
I think signal is really only missing usernames (which should come soon) as far as features are concerned. And sadly, I don’t think it will change much. I think signals problem is not really feature wise but adoption wise.
Signal needs more marketing. It needs a bigger user base. And I honestly don’t know how to change that. Maybe some really top notch marketing strategy, with beautiful diagrams and text of some made up scenarios explaining the perils of using Instagram and whatsapp…
I think you’re right?
I also think they’re on the right track (and a better track than apps like telegram - lots of negative social baggage). They really have gotten much farther than any other privacy focused apps.
I don’t know, maybe I have a more optimistic view of the situation. It feel like they’re knocking on the door of going fully mainstream.
Really? I feel like they have worsen their numbers after disabling sms support. I had a few people with whom I could chat on signal. They all moved away. I now have 0 ppl. I still have it installed but ya…
For me it would be:
- Helix: Great editor but needs a lot of development
- Lemmy: 3rd party frontends would have a hard time to catch up with changes, but it’s worth it anyway
- GNU: they could update some stuff and also hurd kernel looks really interesting
- Arch Linux: maybe they would improve wiki or write some software to make life easier on arch
- .NET: I know that microsoft bad but I really like .NET, and it’s devs are doing really nice stuff. And it’s FOSS
- LibreOffice: they could integrate LLMs into their apps maybe
- Wayland: why not?
- Firefox: maybe they will improve performance and catch up with some css features
- Hyprland: it’s working fine at it’s current state, but it always can be better
- Nouveau: it would be a nice alternative to proprietary nvidia drivers
Kubernetes so that it can peak already and then die off.
Disclaimer - I make a living on k8s based solutions and I’m over the stupid complexity for little benefit. It’s like expecting everyone to be a “10x” engineer or some shit when reality is that most of us are just over here sniffing glue.
