There are a lot of engineers and financial quants using Matlab, and the Octave project makes a lot of that Matlab code usable without an expensive Matlab license.
I guess it's not clear to me why (at least in the 'first world') it's wrong for quants and engineers to pay something for the tools they use. (i have spent a fair amount of time contributing to open-source, so I've no problem with OS generally, but I also don't think their is anything wrong with the folks at Matlab getting paid for their efforts. Quants are sure as hell getting paid for theirs).
The better the free software, the greater the exploitation by other people making a bunch of money on it, while the devs work nights and weekends for nothing. I don't have a solution, but there it is.
Jen Fong-Adwent, Jeff Lindsay, Dominic Tarr, James Halliday and Ben Lupton are the five I really admire and think their ideas don't get enough exposure (I realize they've all had successful projects but talking to them at length their ideas generally speaking are fantastic and should be encouraged).
As of a couple years ago development of ntp was largely performed by one Harlan Stenn. He (and the funding issues around ntp) made the news a while back, but the guy probably deserves even more visibility, given the crucial nature of his work.
"Notorious" does mean "famous", but it carries the added implication of being famous for being bad. I suspect the meaning has changed over time, just like "awful" used to mean "awe-inspiring".
A guy called Alexey Tulinov maintains an excellent but very little known, light-weight unicode processing library called libnu. I really wish it had more recognition: https://bitbucket.org/alekseyt/nunicode
Paul Davis of the Ardour project. Ardour is probably one of the best digital audio workstations ever made. Sad thing is that Ardour is such niche software that it doesn't get as much monetary support as it should.
It's light years beyond it, it's a full fledged digital audio workstation capable of high quality studio recordings and mixing. A good analogy would be Paint vs. Photoshop.
EDIT: Not to downplay Audacity which is also awesome, it's just not meant for the same use case.
Ardour is an NLE(Non-linear editing) Audacity is not. Also, Ardour's plugins act in realtime. Ardour is used for recording and mixing music, film, and other things. Audacity is mainly an audio editing program.
Indeed. I make an automatic small monthly contribution of a few dollars to the project (they make it super easy to do it).
BTW since Harrison Consoles have a commercial version of it (MixBus/MixBus32C) and are actively contributing to Ardour, I wonder if they are also supporting it financially.
It's had its share of bugs, but the amount of work he has put into it over the years is pretty incredible. Most other video editors for Linux don't even come close, and it recaptures a lot of the lost glory of Windows Movie Maker before it was rewritten and made ugly.
Oh yes! OpenShot is so great. I haven't used it in a couple of years but when I did it was a pleasure to use as an occasional user with 0 knowledge of video editing software.
An amazing self-hosted cross platform file syncing/sharing service. Being based on git allows for (somewhat) unlimited version history. Simple and elegant, really surprised more people don't know about it.
Jonathan Westhues, author of Solvespace. There are a number of hard things to implement in that code and he did them all initially. Others have been making good contributions too, but it could use more developers. I've been digging in the code myself but have not made a pull request yet. We shall see...
thanks! I was even going to post myself (SQLAlchemy). However our deepest areas of need are the most boring and soul crushing - documentation and bug triaging. Ideally someone else with full push / release access other than me. We get lots of great patches and pull requests but I'm the only one moving it all through. I'm probably not easy to work with (but I'm open to improvement!)
The people building MicroManger (and ImageJ) - the (best/only/reasonable) open source software capable of driving most microscopes used in biology - and then processing that data. It's raw, it's complicated, and (non-technical, demanding, one-off) biologists are the end users. But piped through that software is most every piece of live/functional raw data used in all your cancer/genetics/genomics research. It's also a core to many other downstream, forked, or scripted sets of machine-control, and data-processing. It's a thankless job that literally drives humanity forward.
This isn't a Show HN post with an open bandwagon. It's about nominating underrecognized achievers, the recognizance of which is only objectively done by someone other than the subject in question.
I'm ok with being tactless, if it highlights something important. :)
eg I just pointed out the project (DB Browser for SQLite) that I've been helping out for years. We're widely used, people say very good things about us, and we could definitely use more funding. ;)
My partner Mike Schwartz founded Gluu because he was tired of recommending proprietary access management platforms like Siteminder and IBM Tivoli that were locked behind six figure licenses.
We're now a team of about 30 people with 10 years of development into the Gluu Server, a free open source software platform for SSO, 2FA, access management:
I've always been mystified about what the heck is Tivoli. You indicate it is an access management system. Can you please provide more details ... I'm intrigued.
Urban from LibrePCB, who has been developing a free/libre EDA suite (for PCB design) mostly by himself for over 4 years now: http://librepcb.org/ The first release will hopefully be out this year.
If you think a FOSS KiCAD "competitor" with a solid and well thought-out library design and good usability should be supported, then check out his Patreon page (or his BTC address). Or – of course – contribute code.
Interesting! I'm a KiCAD user but have never heard of this. Why doesn't Urban just contribute to KiCAD instead of maintaining a separate open source project?
Apologies if he mentions it in the video -- I'm at work.
>> Why doesn't Urban just contribute to KiCAD instead of maintaining a separate open source project?
Not every open source project is built the way a person thinks it should be. The only way to know if an alternate viewpoint is better is to build it and find out. Other times a person just wants to build it for themselves for their own reasons. Either way, variety can be a good thing. One day an alternative may just replace your favorite piece of software and then you might ask why the creator started from so far behind all those years ago...
There are probably as many reasons as there are developers.
Do you know anything about this project or is this just a generic diatribe?
I was hoping to hear about his opinions of the shortcomings of KiCAD and where LibrePCB improves on them. It would certainly help someone like me decide whether to fund him on Patreon or not, seeing as I've donated to CERN for KiCAD development.
Consider supporting Henry Zhu, the maintainer of Babel. Henry decided to dedicate himself 100% to open-source earlier this year and is one of the main reasons Babel is such an indispensable (albeit invisible) tool. Henry welcomes contributions at https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu/memberships
seriously. its insane that some startups are raising VC money that 100% would not be able to exist without Babel being maintained. Some of that money should go to Babel but won't. How do we fix this so that Henry doesnt have to keep begging? It's really broken.
Start from the projects you are using. You might find that many of them are primarily one-man efforts and could use some support.
For example, we use verdaccio (https://www.verdaccio.org/) as a private NPM server. IT was so mindblowingly simple to get a private server working that, when the opportunity presented itself, we felt compelled to donate: https://opencollective.com/verdaccio
In this case, it seems that there was an older abandoned effort (sinopia) and the original developer Alex Kocharin (https://github.com/rlidwka) stopped. Juan Picado (https://github.com/juanpicado) picked up the mantle and given how NPM is moving fast and breaking things it's great to see someone is keeping up with the open source solution.
The ones that undeterred maintains software they haven't built themselves.
For instance the maintainers of Mithril.js (pygy, tivac, isiahmeadows) is/has been doing great work for a long time, with nothing in return. There are many like them out there on other projects, I'm sure, who doesn't get the thanks that they deserve.
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https://github.com/substack https://github.com/balupton
2015 article: https://www.informationweek.com/it-life/ntp-harlan-stenn-and...
And more support is most definitely always welcome!
* Calf: A small group of devs producing a set of high quality audio processing plugins. https://calf-studio-gear.org/
* Ardour - pretty well known I think, but only in the narrow cross-section of audio geeks and Linux geeks. https://ardour.org/
https://ardour.org/
EDIT: Not to downplay Audacity which is also awesome, it's just not meant for the same use case.
BTW since Harrison Consoles have a commercial version of it (MixBus/MixBus32C) and are actively contributing to Ardour, I wonder if they are also supporting it financially.
BTW I've switched from plain Ardour to MixBus a few months ago, and I'm not sure why but it produces much better results for me.
The better results are probably due to Harrison's EQ and console bus emulation.
https://www.openshot.org/
It's had its share of bugs, but the amount of work he has put into it over the years is pretty incredible. Most other video editors for Linux don't even come close, and it recaptures a lot of the lost glory of Windows Movie Maker before it was rewritten and made ugly.
An amazing self-hosted cross platform file syncing/sharing service. Being based on git allows for (somewhat) unlimited version history. Simple and elegant, really surprised more people don't know about it.
[0] https://github.com/ornicar [1] https://github.com/ornicar/lila/ [2] https://lichess.org/
https://micro-manager.org/wiki/Micro-Manager
Nico Sturman used to be one of the project leads, but it's been a while since I've kept up with who runs it now.
cough-- I also very much like pizza: https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html
https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html
https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2018.html
But is it Pizza Pizza?
eg I just pointed out the project (DB Browser for SQLite) that I've been helping out for years. We're widely used, people say very good things about us, and we could definitely use more funding. ;)
We're now a team of about 30 people with 10 years of development into the Gluu Server, a free open source software platform for SSO, 2FA, access management:
https://gluu.org/docs/ce
It sounds though like this is, in fact, a commercial venture.
If you think a FOSS KiCAD "competitor" with a solid and well thought-out library design and good usability should be supported, then check out his Patreon page (or his BTC address). Or – of course – contribute code.
Here you can find a LibrePCB introduction video from this year's FOSDEM: https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/
(Edit: Punctuation)
Apologies if he mentions it in the video -- I'm at work.
Not every open source project is built the way a person thinks it should be. The only way to know if an alternate viewpoint is better is to build it and find out. Other times a person just wants to build it for themselves for their own reasons. Either way, variety can be a good thing. One day an alternative may just replace your favorite piece of software and then you might ask why the creator started from so far behind all those years ago...
There are probably as many reasons as there are developers.
I was hoping to hear about his opinions of the shortcomings of KiCAD and where LibrePCB improves on them. It would certainly help someone like me decide whether to fund him on Patreon or not, seeing as I've donated to CERN for KiCAD development.
Edit: I've found his reasons in his slides - https://www.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/atta...
For example, we use verdaccio (https://www.verdaccio.org/) as a private NPM server. IT was so mindblowingly simple to get a private server working that, when the opportunity presented itself, we felt compelled to donate: https://opencollective.com/verdaccio
In this case, it seems that there was an older abandoned effort (sinopia) and the original developer Alex Kocharin (https://github.com/rlidwka) stopped. Juan Picado (https://github.com/juanpicado) picked up the mantle and given how NPM is moving fast and breaking things it's great to see someone is keeping up with the open source solution.
- and -
Natron video compositing software: https://natron.fr/
Both are great tools with a steady stream of updates.
OpenBSD core developers.