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Ask HN: What abandoned OSS project would you like to see revived?
54 points by swatcoder on March 23, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 74 comments
I've been writing code forever but took a break to pursue some other interests. Now I'm ready to come back.

I'm looking for an open-source project to busy myself with while I resume networking and freelancing.

Ideally, I'd like to revive an practical OSS project that's been abandoned. Something useful but left untended for whatever reason.

What are some candidates? What project is broadly useful but seems to have lost its maintainer or their interest? What do you wish somebody was actively working on so that you didn't have to?

I've chosen not to offer constraints so that this can be more of a wishlist for the community than an answer just for me. I know there's some other people out there that would be eager to do the same thing I am.

Thanks, all!




Pidgin. While it's not dead, v3 is still very far, and an up to date, all-in-one messaging solution is ackingly missing - especially for mobile.


Exactly. Moreover, Pidgin is not only extremely useful already, but could also solve some further issues such as usability, customizability, and security in everyday communication.


The lightweight and modern Linux desktop. LXQt is what I used to work on (I still help out once in a while), and it just doesn't have the manpower and organization required to produce something really good.

Working on the Desktop is a really interesting thing. The goal is to turn machines into something usable for, nowdays essentially browsing the web or gaming (with the oddball app that does more than that).

It's a very rewarding thing. Hit me up if you are interested: Swing by the #lxqt channel on IRC and DM me (jleclanche, or agaida if I'm not here). It's a place where you can get to either work on stuff that already exists, or make up your own new ideas, or help bring standards together.


Absolutely love LXQt. Amazingly good desktop. Enlightenment is another fantastic low power high feature desktop environment that suffers from the same lack of devs. Both of these have spurred me a bit further into learning coding myself to help out, but real life works always seems to get in the way.


what's wrong with xfce?


Oh c'mon! OP didn't even mention it!

There's nothing wrong with Xfce (I'm a very happy user myself), but they're distinct projects and the OP makes a good case and gives useful info about LXQt, as fits the thread.


Amphetype - https://code.google.com/archive/p/amphetype/

It's an old typing tutor that uses statistics about your typing speed on different character combinations to generate customized lessons... I haven't seen those features in any other tutor. I used it years ago to train myself in a new keyboard layout. I would love to see an updated, maybe web enabled version that replicates the tracking and custom lesson features.


A Linux mobile operating system (i.e. revive Mer & Maemo).

PostmarketOS is trying this, but they would benefit immensely from the above 2 getting tons of help as they are basically dead.


You're not alone, someone else has already revived it:

https://maemo-leste.github.io/


>A Linux mobile operating system (i.e. revive Mer & Maemo).

Agreed. I had mentioned the N900 in a recent HN thread about Linux handhelds, and someone mentioned there is a new project called Neo900.

I did not know about Mer, what is it?


There is also The Librem 5 from Purism, they finished the fundraising and posting updates regularly

puri.sm/shop/librem-5/


And WebOS, recently reanimated


Tizen, webOS, LineageOS?


I'd like to see this project revived and expanded:

https://github.com/omni360/assemblino.js

There used to be a site to try it out, but now you'll have to clone it and start it up locally yourself.

It's basically a javascript/node webgl robotics simulation kit; you can even interface your simulation to an Arduino to have the simulator control a real robot.

There's various "parts" models (wheels, servos, etc) included, which are just javascript object definitions; plus a variety of basic components that can be "glued" into larger assemblies.

I'd like to see it enhanced and expanded; from that perspective, I'd like to see:

1. Additional "real world" platforms supported (raspi, beagleboard, etc)

2. This could arguably be done via integration with something like http://johnny-five.io/

3. Add the ability to use models built via https://openjscad.org/ (?)

4. Perhaps integrate things with https://github.com/octoblu ?

Basically build it out into a really neat toolkit for robotics, iot, and ai/ml research and fun (to that later end, perhaps add on something like http://propelml.org/ and other libraries?)...


https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb


It breaks my heart to see that the last blog post is from July 17, 1017 along with all the stagnant information on the community page. I had some hopes that momentum would develop after the project transferred to community governance.


This can probably be explained by the enormous effort it took to create a single blog post in 1017, just getting the right stone could take weeks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnut_the_Great#/media/File:U_1...


Deis Workflow [1]

I had really high hopes for this, but the team was acquired by Microsoft and the project was abandoned. I don't think is a job for a single developer, so it probably needs a company to sponsor development. EDIT: They updated the README recently with a link to a fork [2], but there's no new commits for 7 months.

I'm very happy with convox [3] now, and they're mostly open source [4]. Their management console is a freemium SaaS service, which includes GitHub/GitLab/Slack integrations. The console can be self-hosted, but that requires an enterprise license.

[1] https://github.com/deis/workflow

[2] https://github.com/teamhephy/workflow

[3] https://convox.com/

[4] https://github.com/convox/rack


Mozilla Persona was a promising idea. It was ahead of its time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona


Not quite an abandoned project, but if you want to be helpful, see if your local government publishes any data and do something helpful with it.

Here in Seattle, the OneBusAway bus tracker app was originally built as a side project, but is has substantially evolved into into its own company. https://github.com/OneBusAway

This project attempts to put a dollar value on car accidents: :http://seattlecollisions.timganter.io/collisions

Or this, which automatically scapes videos of city council meetings and transcribes the audio: https://github.com/OpenDataLiteracy/jksn-2017/tree/master/CD...


FreeMind - http://freemind.sourceforge.net

Still by far the best knowledge management software out there, but is down to one developer working on it part time and it hasn't received a proper update in years.


Ubiquity for Firefox. It was an overlay that let you type commands to use and combine web services using natural language. It understood pronouns, so you could highlight text and say "map this" and it would look up the selection in Google maps. You would subscribe to command feeds that could be updated automatically for bug fixes or to keep up with changing APIs. By the time the project was abandoned, it had an advanced language engine with noun or verb autocomplete in multiple languages including different subject-verb-object orders.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101030050714/https://wiki.mozi...


Seashore - it was a fantastic Mac-specific fork of Gimp with a great native user experience.

Last updated in September of 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seashore_(software)


I'd like to see Abiword come back to life. Even adding docx saving support would go a long way.

Abiword looks slick, works blazingly fast. IMHO it provides the best experience for end users.


Haiku is not abandoned, it has relatively up to date ports of all the common compilers and libraries, but it just needs some polish. You could pick some rough edge and clean it up.


Apache Wave ( former Google Wave ). But without the mentality of "replacing email for good, now!" baby steps, embrace and suffocate this time...


Seconded, It seemed really cool and had a great mission.

http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html

People seemed to like it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16442378


The Axiom computer algebra system. Not sure what the status of the project is, but the last release notes are from 2014. They had big ambitions, including a completely literate codebase and provably correct implementations of all of their core algorithms.

http://www.axiom-developer.org/


It's a protocol, not a project, but it's one beloved to FOSS: RSS


RSS and Atom are still very much alive! Partly because they are so simple.


Moreso because they are decentralized. People just don’t get how important that is.


I don't really want to see RSS improved, I just want the world to embrace JSON Feed as its replacement (https://jsonfeed.org/). Probably never gonna happen though -- there's not enough value to incentive any websites to implement it.


What kind of updates do you want to RSS?


It’s kind of null and void because of it’s recent re-OSS’ing but WebOS never reached half it’s potential. It’s not exactly abandoned but I’d love to see the ability to sideload it onto Android.


Dedoimedo featured some great projects recently, some of them abandoned: http://www.ocsmag.com/2018/03/21/the-magnificent-seven-uniqu...

The unmaintained ones seem to be Kaptan (desktop configuration wizard) and TeenPup Magic Scripts (drag and drop scripts), not sure about Unity Dash.


About the TeenPup magic scripts, maybe have a look at LegacyOS. The latest (and last/final version) is LegacyOS 2017

Those scripts are also on there, but those distros are made to be OLD


Thanks! Interesting project, may come handy in the future...

For reference: http://www.puppylinux.org/wikka/legacyos


https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk


I didn't know it was dead. Thats very sad... Do we have alternative or forks?


None that I know of unfortunately.


sorry, unrelated, and probably just a nick collision - but theli, you didn't play Ragnarok Online on euRO by chance?


I would like hot corners on Linux, but all the programs that I find seem to be abandoned. https://github.com/brianhsu/xfce4-hotcorner-plugin looks most promising, but it needs updating to work with current XFCE.


KDE supports them by default, if I'm remembering correctly. If not default it's in settings.


Cinnamon supports them out of the box as well, it's System Settings -> Preferences -> Hot Corners. I had to run the Brightside daemon to get it working on MATE, but I don't know if that's true anymore.


I used to make a few small contributions to https://github.com/msmhq/msm, but no longer have the time and nobody else has stepped up.

If you'd be interested, I'm happy to give you commit permissions - just shoot me an email (in HN profile).


Just curiosity, have you made any $ through donations? I consider doing full time open source development in similar niche (game servers, twitch related tools). Searching now for success stories. Hope to make a little cash via donations but not going paid/closed software model.


Not sure, I'm not the one that created the project and never had access to the PayPal. We do rely on monthly supporters of our open source work at https://hackclub.com and the #1 learning is to ask for monthly commitments. $5/month is much more meaningful than a one time gift of $5.


I wanna say Compiz, but I feel like I am the only one using it full time. It would probably be a wast of time.


No, I was (until very recently). Sad to see it go...


Boodler - a Python based soundscape generation tool. http://boodler.org

https://github.com/erkyrath/boodler


Ubuntu one. It was a dropbox alternative but it was abandoned. They made the code available but I never managed to get it to work on my own server.

https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone


Why not use Nextcloud?


https://sourceforge.net/projects/faces-project/


GNU Hurd


Disco Distributed Filesystem

Still somewhat active, but I had to tweak a few things to get it running on my Mac a few months ago.


http://opensimulator.org


Chartist. Great, tiny footprint, good API. Doesn't use canvas, which is a rarity.


Yahoo Pipes


Thunderbird


https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2017/12/new-thunderbird...


I think it's officially un-abandoned now, but as it sounded at the FOSDEM booth, they're absolutely looking for new contributors :)


Not an abandoned project but I really could do with some help on this open source website builder for the real estate sector:

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder


Camino. A Gecko browser with a native Mac UI.


Upstart


Dogecoin


https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin

last commit 2 months ago


Not sure if you're serious, but they are still working on it some https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/7yhdtr/official_1...


Partly,

“Jackson Palmer, the founder of Dogecoin (who has since left the company), told CoinDesk that “it says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in general that a currency with a dog on it which hasn’t released a software update in over 2 years has a $1B+ market cap.” “

http://fortune.com/2018/01/08/dogecoin-hits-all-time-high-2-...


Freemind


I use freelance now.


BRL-CAD


Didn't they get a Summer of Code project going this year?


Looks like! https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/5240726938...


gated was nice, I miss it




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