Disclaimer: I know that being a developer is hard, I’m not trying to say that people should start doing these ideas to please my desires. I just thought it was fun to have a list of ideas that could improve the libre software community and these are some of them that I would really love to see. If you have some other Ideas contribute as well, and if you are a developer and you are looking for something to do but don’t know what, you may gain some inspiration from here.
Projects that do not exist:
-
Libre and privacy respecting alternative to DeepL. Details: I know there are already some libre translators, but I will not stop using DeepL until there’s something as good as it.
-
Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Genius. Details: It’s a website where users create community based lyrics for their favourite artists and can create annotations and add metadata.
-
Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Goodreads. Details: It’s a website where you keep a log of what you’ve read, what you want to read and what you are reading, you can also rate books.Here is an alternative. -
Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Grammarly. Details: It’s a set of applications or add-ons that help you with typos and it will improve your text.
-
Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Letterboxd. Details: t’s a website where you keep a log of what you’ve seen and what you want to see, you can also rate movies and TV shows.
-
Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Pixabay. Details: It’s a website where you can get images to use without copyright restrictions. I know CC has a website for this but their content is really poor.
-
Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Push notifications.Here is an alternative. -
Libre and privacy respecting alternative to ReCaptcha.
-
Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Shazam. Details: It’s an application that tells you what you are listening if you let it listen to it
-
Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Unsplash. Details: It’s a website where you can upload and use photos of people that are licensed under a license that allows for use under most circumstances for free.
-
Libre and privacy respecting mouse gesture and
radial menuto an operative system level. *Similar to Gesturefy andCompassMenubut in a way that it can work in any application. Look this video for more details since this is probably a really deep and hard to explain topic. Here is an alternative for the radial menu. -
Libre and privacy respecting website where to upload and download 3D models licensed under a CC.
-
Libre and privacy respecting website where to play a lot of different card games. Details: Similar to Lichess. I am satisfied if you only can play poker until it gains some traction.
-
Fully libre and privacy respecting alternative to Xayn. Details: It’s an application that recommends you articles based on the input you give to the algorithm. Some of its code it’s liberated on GitHub, but not all of it.
-
Libre , decentralized and privacy respecting alternative to Imgur. Details: It would be great if this could work along the fediverse, for example people would host images there instead of here on Lemmy or Mastodon, making these platforms much more lightweight.
-
Libre, privacy respecting and not self hostable visual bookmark manager. *Details: There are a few alternatives here and there, maybe, but they are really awful looking and generally you need to self host. I don’t know how to self host and it would probably make my machine slower, I would prefer something that someone’s alreay hosting. This is exactly like what I’m looking for, but they haven’t launched it yet since they don have enough resources, it could die, too, maybe.
Projects that exist but have some issues:
-
A set of common android apps. Details: I know there are a are a lot of basic Android applications to replace the default ones that come with your phone but I feel someone should create a set that align the aesthetics of them to be coherent with each other. I know Tibor Kaputa does this, but in my opinion I would like something that looks a bit more modern and that has more features, since theirs are based around minimalism. For example, the camera application does not have as many options as my default one, etc.
-
Libre, privacy respecting, aesthetic and functional map application. Details: I haven’t been able to find a working application to see maps, I generally end up using DDG’s in browser map because of this. The only one that worked was one calle Maps which was a fork of a really good one (but it was filled with proprietary and other shady stuff ) but it stopped working after some time. I mention the aesthetic parts because I want to be able to recommend this to people who wouldn’t use it otherwise if it looks like something really “primitive”.
-
Revive waifu2x as a serious project. Details: I really love this website, but I really hate the whole idea of the waifu thing, it is misogynous and I feel like unprofessional.
-
Libre, privacy respecting and highly customizable home launcher. Details: I know there are a ton of home launchers for Android, but most of them focus on minimalism or simplicity, I don’t want that, I want a super customizable full of features application that can let me do almost anything. The closest to this was Lawnchair which is dead, luckily Omega launcher exists now and it looks like it’ll be able to achieve this, but it’s not there yet.
-
Revive AquaDroid Details: It is a really beautiful application but it has some bugs, not so many features and development has halted.
You should make a git repo for this list
Great discussion. One critical thing is libre alternative to GPT3 or similar.
This is absolutely magnificent
Yeah, that sound like a really important stuff that should be open.
It would be great if there was a website where people could propose ideas like this, and also vote on the proposed ideas. That way we would have a good community-wide overview of which projects do most people want to see happen. Instead of getting an “I wish this kind of project would exist” post every now and then on some random part of the internet.
deleted by creator
Wouldn’t that be very similar to https://lemmy.ml/c/floss_replacement ? Would it be better to get that community to be for both, existing projects and proposals, or would it be better to have two communities?
Grammarly FOSS alternative: https://languagetool.org/ Multilanguage (It recognizes which one are you using, that is very useful for me as I use 3 - Catalan, Castilian, and English -) and it is sponsored by the European Union
For French, Grammalecte is also nice. What I like about it is that I can very easily make it work with Emacs and AucTeX.
Libre , decentralized and privacy respecting alternative to Imgur.
There are a few single click drag&drop upload solutions, e.g. linx-server which also have image/file preview and hotlinking:
Fantastic list! I would love to find an open-source, decentralised alternative to iMDB/Letterboxd for tracking movies. If anyone knows of one, let me know!
OsmAnd is a good map app.
Yes, someone already recommended it to me and I’m using it, I love it! I’m going to edit the post when I have some time.
For grammarly, check out LanguageTool. For ReCaptcha, chech out Friendlycaptcha
LanguageTool’s extension is closed source.
https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool-browser-addon
See how the extension repo says it is outdated? It is not libre anymore.
For grammarly there is LanguageTool. There are browser add-ons, libreoffice plugin, and command line tool for checking plain text
I think the add-on is closed source, but you are right.
You’re right. The source code for the free one is archived, I didn’t notice that.
Okay, I checked and is the browser addon.
Browser addon or ApacheOO/LibreOffice plugin?
The browser addon was released under LGPL-2.1, but it was “completely rewritten and under a new license”, and from the look of #241 and #251 they seem proprietary. It’s core and office extension is open-source tho.
I meant the browser add-on which at least in Mozilla’s add-on store is licensed under “Custom License” which generally means proprietary.
For translation, Mozilla and the EU have been working on client-side (cloud-less) translation: https://browser.mt
You can see it in action (as part of an experimental Firefox extension) here: https://recordit.co/snvH1lNIqU
The most important I can think of is a libre alternative to the Metaverse…
For Imgur, there’s Pixelfed (for a traditional image-hosting website) or IPFS (where you can host/pin any file).
My idea isn’t like a social platform but rather a hosting website which focuses on those images being displayed somewhere else, but maybe Pixelfed can be used in the same way? I have heard about IPFS but I haven’t really looked into it, I know it has a lot of different features and possibilities which seems interesting and promising.
Image hosting badly needs a decentralized hosted option, ideally one based on torrents or IPFS, because the situation right now is horrible. The exact same image gets shared to twitter, reddit, imgur, FB, and a ton of other platforms, each having to host their own copy while sharing none of the bandwidth to serve them.
Grammica is one of best tool to check your sentence structure and lot of text related tool.
Regarding the map application: osmand for Android, don’t know if there exist ports to other platforms. As you can download from fdroid, it should meet most oft your criteria. You can directly contribute to open Street maps and do some nice bike navigation as well. And it’s very aesthetical, I think;-)
I found one called OsmAnd+, I’m guessing it’s the same one. Yep, this is really what I’ve been looking for, it looks great and it works flawlessly, too. It has so many features I think it’ll take me some time to learn how to use it. Thanks a lot!
And to contribute to osmand+, there is the app Street Complete on fdroid. You can use it to add / correct locations and streets. It looks awesome and contributing feels like a video game. It’s honestly amazing.
What about a FOSS alternative to Netflix? Something without tracking, DRM maybe… :D
I think it would be almost impossible due to copyright. :/