HACKER Q&A
📣 acaloiar

What open source software do you wish existed, but does not?


I'm curious if there's any consensus around the problems that could be solved with software, but aren't getting any attention from the open source community.

In a world of public software forges chock-full of open source software, it's hard to imagine that there are problems that could be solved with software that aren't getting any attention. But I suspect there are many.

I use "software" broadly here. Answers may refer to libraries and frameworks for developers, but perhaps more importantly, applications for both highly technical and average users.

My hope is that this question both reveals solutions that already exist for which others thought none existed, and real gaps where the open source community can step in and start creating solutions.


  👤 chunk_waffle Accepted Answer ✓
I'm probably the minority with this request but: A Sublime Text clone, with many of the same features and at least some level of compatibility with existing packages. That'd be great.

And it's not that I don't want to pay for Sublime, I just want it to work on OpenBSD.


👤 zzo38computer
There are many things that I had wanted to find which are not commonly available in FOSS, or are difficult to find, or are just not available at all:

- Simple music playback library like MOD/S3M/IT/XM formats but you will provide your own command stream and instruments (including possibility of non-12-TET music) instead of loading from any file format.

- Non-Unicode SQLite. (Non-Unicode can greatly improve speed of some functions, as well as making some operations considerably less messy.)

- Fonts of TRON character set (especially bitmap (screen) fonts and PostScript fonts). (There does not seem to be a good way to do it with TrueType, although with bitmap fonts it could easily be done, and anyways I like to have bitmap fonts.)

- Program you can other non-Xaw GUIs with Xaw.

- A Pokemon battle simulator library in C.

- FOSS implementation of BTRON. (There is one called B-Free which unfortunately seems to be incomplete and abandoned. I had forked and only made a single change so far, which is adding the D (64-bit) type. If date/time type is then D instead of W, then the year 2053 problem can be avoided.)

- Zoned spreadsheet.

(I had done a few things related to some of the above, but not much.)