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Ask HN: What abandoned OSS project would you like to see revived?

54 points by swatcoder ↗ HN
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!

77 comments

[ 105 ms ] story [ 5506 ms ] thread
lostgame
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.
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basher
Dogecoin
veritas3241
Not sure if you're serious, but they are still working on it some https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/7yhdtr/official_1...
basher
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-...

[dead] jadedhacker
I'm kind of stunned there was a company behind it. I thought it was only a joke. O.o
nextos
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.

vram22
>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?

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

puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

Y_Y
GNU Hurd
undoware
It's a protocol, not a project, but it's one beloved to FOSS: RSS
fenwick67
RSS and Atom are still very much alive! Partly because they are so simple.
ComputerGuru
Moreso because they are decentralized. People just don’t get how important that is.
jobigoud
What kind of updates do you want to RSS?
oxguy3
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.
darkorange
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/

cucumberferity
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.
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smnscu
https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb
sensen
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.
zachlatta
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).

rouxz
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.
zachlatta
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.
billyjobob
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.
Mononokay
KDE supports them by default, if I'm remembering correctly. If not default it's in settings.
nieve
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.
pmlnr
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.
ivcha
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.
nathan_f77
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

deegles
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.

rch
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.

scrollaway
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.

walrus01
what's wrong with xfce?
severine
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.

cannonedhamster
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.