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Ask HN: Who are some unsung heroes in open source that need more support?
- rajeshbatralive 8y agohttps://github.com/wajahatkarim3 https://github.com/wajahatkarim3
- sattoshi 8y agoWho is he?
- rajeshbatra 8y agohe call himself Wantrepreneur, https://github.com/wajahatkarim3/MediumClap-Android https://github.com/wajahatkarim3/MediumClap-Android
- nagVenkat 8y agoPlease support GNU Octave if you can.
- fiveFeet 8y agoI used to be a big fan of octave until I learned python + numpy + pandas dataframes. After that I did not have much need for octave.
- poster123 8y agoThere 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.
- ljw1001 8y agoI 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).
- jhasse 8y agoI just think that Matlab shouldn't be taught at universities.
- poster123 8y agoI agree that Matlab has a right to be paid for its product, but it is still nice to have a free alternative.
- ljw1001 8y agoThe 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.
- dnautics 8y agoI used to use and love GNU octave, but much prefer Julia these days, which is also open-source.
- neom 8y agoJen 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). https://github.com/ednapiranha https://github.com/ednapiranha https://github.com/progrium https://github.com/progrium https://github.com/dominictarr https://github.com/dominictarr https://github.com/substack https://github.com/substack https://github.com/balupton https://github.com/balupton
- nategri 8y agoAs 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. 2015 article: https://www.informationweek.com/it-life/ntp-harlan-stenn-and-an-uncertain-future-readers-react/d/d-id/1319521 https://www.informationweek.com/it-life/ntp-harlan-stenn-and...
- bradknowles 8y agoIndeed, Harlan and the Network Time Foundation (nwtime.org) are continuing to work on the NTP protocol and related subjects. And more support is most definitely always welcome!
- bradknowles 8y agoNB: I am an unpaid volunteer for the NTF and the NTP Public Services Project at ntp.org.
- robertk 8y agoNotoriety means infamy, or the state of being well known for something terrible. Did you mean a different word?
- nategri 8y agoThank you, yes, it's been corrected---"visibility" serves the purpose I intended.
- nkkollaw 8y agoReally? I didn't know that,in Italian it a similar word translates into "famous". I wonder how many times I've used it incorrectly...
- cperciva 8y ago"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".
- dvirsky 8y agoA 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 https://bitbucket.org/alekseyt/nunicode
- dvirsky 8y agoTwo other FOSS projects I like but are not super known: * Calf: A small group of devs producing a set of high quality audio processing plugins. https://calf-studio-gear.org/ 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/
- aaronarduino 8y agoPaul 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. https://ardour.org/ https://ardour.org/
- j45 8y agoWow. Am I missing something or is Ardour a more capable kind of Audacity?
- dvirsky 8y agoIt'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.
- j45 8y agoNice, and free. I think my podcasting friends may like this.
- aaronarduino 8y agoArdour 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.
- koala_man 8y agoAudacity never required me to save over existing files or magnetic tape. Why do you say it's a linear editor?
- dvirsky 8y agoIndeed. 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.
- ravenstine 8y agoJonathan Thomas over at Openshot Video Editor: https://www.openshot.org/ 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.
- dvirsky 8y agoOh 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.
- bufferoverflow 8y agoDavinci Resolve blows everything else out of the water, and it's free. Available for Linux, Win, Mac.
- ravenstine 8y agoNot open source. There's nothing wrong with that, except it's not what we're talking about here.
- inspector14 8y agoSparkleShare / Hylke Bons 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.
- phkahler 8y agoJonathan 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...
- sldenazis 8y agoOrnicar[0], author of lila[1], the chess server behind the greatest chess site of internet[2]. [0] https://github.com/ornicar https://github.com/ornicar [1] https://github.com/ornicar/lila/ https://github.com/ornicar/lila/ [2] https://lichess.org/ https://lichess.org/
- BerislavLopac 8y agoBen Darnell of Tornado and Mike Bayer (aka zzzeek) of SQLAlchemy.
- zzzeek 8y agothanks! 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!)
- toufka 8y agoThe 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. https://micro-manager.org/wiki/Micro-Manager 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.
- brynet 8y agoWith my OpenBSD developer hat on, hardware donations welcome here too: https://www.openbsd.org/want.html https://www.openbsd.org/want.html cough-- I also very much like pizza: https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html
- brynet 8y agoThe OpenBSD foundation also hasn't received any corporate donations as of yet for 2018: https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2018.html https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2018.html
- busterarm 8y ago> cough-- I also very much like pizza: https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html But is it Pizza Pizza?
- brynet 8y agoI'll eat Pizza from anywhere! Even Pizza Pizza.
- haddadda 8y agoopenmhealth.org - we're build an open data standard for mobile health data.
- notatoad 8y agoPSA: nominating yourself in threads like this is pretty tactless.
- brynet 8y agoGuilty.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- willow9886 8y agoWhy? If an author or maintainer of a FOSS project wants to highlight their own work, so the community might too benefit, what's the issue?
- jstarfish 8y agoThis 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.
- hutzlibu 8y agoWell, calling yourself a unsung hero ... is maybe a bit, well, low. Usually others judge, who is a hero.
- ljw1001 8y agoCalling people tactless after they've worked their asses off building something they give to strangers for free is more tactless.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- willow9886 8y agoMy 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: https://gluu.org/docs/ce https://gluu.org/docs/ce
- ljw1001 8y agoIronically, the reason there are so many unsung heroes of open-source is precisely because their products are not "locked behind" expensive licenses. It sounds though like this is, in fact, a commercial venture.
- brutus1213 8y agoI'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.
- dbrgn 8y agoUrban 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/ 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. Here you can find a LibrePCB introduction video from this year's FOSDEM: https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/ https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/ (Edit: Punctuation)
- cbHXBY1D 8y agoInteresting! 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.
- phkahler 8y ago>> 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.
- cbHXBY1D 8y agoDo 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. Edit: I've found his reasons in his slides - https://www.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/attachments/slides/2267/export/events/attachments/cad_librepcb/slides/2267/librepcb_slides.pdf https://www.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/atta...
- georgecalm 8y agoConsider 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 https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu/memberships
- FLGMwt 8y agoBabel has some crazy throughput going through it to drive a massive percentage of the modern web. Wild to see how low the funding is.
- swyx 8y agoseriously. 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.
- TAForObvReasons 8y agoBabel has an open collective: https://opencollective.com/babel https://opencollective.com/babel
- sheetjs 8y agoStart 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/ 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 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 https://github.com/rlidwka) stopped. Juan Picado (https://github.com/juanpicado 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.
- makx 8y agoShotcut Video Editor: https://shotcut.org/ https://shotcut.org/ - and - Natron video compositing software: https://natron.fr/ https://natron.fr/ Both are great tools with a steady stream of updates.
- petrohi 8y agoLoïc Hoguin. The author of Cowboy web server. De facto standard web server in Erlang/Elixir. Foundation for Plug and Phoenix frameworks.
- porsager 8y agoThe 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.
- panoply 8y agoDon’t sell yourself short porsager, you’re apart of that finely tuned Mithril machine too.
- bckmn 8y agoThere's an NPM package started for this: https://github.com/feross/thanks https://github.com/feross/thanks
- tvlooy 8y agoOpenBSD is heavily underfunded compared to what value they deliver. See https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html
- zacharycarter 8y agoAraq and the other Nim core developers. OpenBSD core developers.
- koala_man 8y agoAll the wonderful people who package software for their distro! We take for granted the ability to install anything via our package managers, but it's made possible by efforts of a vast number of contributors who often just like a piece of software and stepped up to allow everyone else to use it too. Too often they get zero recognition for their efforts. I'm doubly grateful because I'm also an upstream maintainer who doesn't have to try to keep up with all the various packaging processes. If you want to support them, the next time some software is unavailable or lagging behind in your distro, see what you can do to help!
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoI know I'm going to get downvoted to hell for this, but am I the only one who thinks of these people's efforts as a huge amount of wasted time? Why should anyone have to package software aside from the developer who made it? Why should it have to be done for so many different package repositories and packaging formats? Why are people ok this?
- heyoni 8y agoI’m fairly sure that it often is the developers packaging it for different platforms... Sometimes though, people do it...and it might even be automated.
- probonopd 8y agoSystems like the Open Build Service can ease the pain a bit by building for different distributions and versions, but it is a pain nevertheless. Luckily the Open Build Service instance at https://build.opensuse.org/ https://build.opensuse.org/ can also do AppImages, which run on most "Desktop Linux" systems.
- kosma 8y agoBecause the software is inconsistent (and thus buggy) in that regard. Also, barely any developer possesses the knowledge and infrastructure necessary to build their software for dozens of arcane architectures. Packagers create the glue between the software (which is heterogeneous) and the distro (which is internally consistent). The world without this glue is a horrible mess and a huge waste of time; the old Slackware is a good example. It's thanks to the distro makers that you don't have to spend days collecting requirements and acquiring arcane knowledge just to install a piece of software. So: yes, those people devote a huge amount of time - so the countless users around the world don't have to. The net time value is positive.
- kartiksura 8y agoRIBS2 (Robust Infrastructure for Backend Systems, ver. 2) https://github.com/Adaptv/ribs2 https://github.com/Adaptv/ribs2 Great framework to build highly scalable, low latency service (developer friendly). It would be great some detailed tutorials and documentation about its internals.
- blzaugg 8y agoJon Neal[0] You can thank him for: normalize.css[1], sanitize.css, SVG4Everybody, HTML5 Shiv[4], and the yayQuery Podcast theme music[5]. And many more[6][7]. [0] http://jonathantneal.github.io/ http://jonathantneal.github.io/ [1] http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize-css/#overview http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize-css/#overview [2] https://github.com/csstools/sanitize.css https://github.com/csstools/sanitize.css [3] https://github.com/jonathantneal/svg4everybody https://github.com/jonathantneal/svg4everybody [4] https://github.com/aFarkas/html5shiv#who-can-i-get-mad-at-now https://github.com/aFarkas/html5shiv#who-can-i-get-mad-at-no... [5] https://jonneal.bandcamp.com/track/yayquery https://jonneal.bandcamp.com/track/yayquery [6] https://github.com/himynameisdave/postcss-plugins/blob/master/docs/authors.md https://github.com/himynameisdave/postcss-plugins/blob/maste... [7] https://www.npmjs.com/~jonathantneal https://www.npmjs.com/~jonathantneal
- TAForObvReasons 8y agoThe html5shiv was originally based on a discovery by https://twitter.com/sjoerd_visscher https://twitter.com/sjoerd_visscher and represents a iterative process involving many developers, at least according to Paul Irish https://www.paulirish.com/2011/the-history-of-the-html5-shiv/ https://www.paulirish.com/2011/the-history-of-the-html5-shiv...
- threeseed 8y agoSébastien Doeraene (srd) and David Barri (japgolly). Former built almost all of ScalaJS and the latter built ScalaJS-React. It's inspired a lot of KotlinJS as well.
- mrburton 8y agoShay Banon - Founder of Elastic Search. He's been in the Open Source space for years building frameworks like Compass which influenced Red Hat to build Hibernate Search. He's done other work as well. Ross Mason - Founder of Mule Soft. He built Mule which is Open Source and helped many companies better integrate services. Joe Walnes - Joe is a beast. He's contributed and created many Open Source projects. websocketd, smoothie, xstream, webbit, and many more. Rick Hightower - A very smart guy who use to blog about technology that helped many many people. He also created Boon a JSON parser, qbit, and many other frameworks. Because of all of his hard work, he was also made a Java Champion. I could name so many more folks. Honestly, it's amazing not more people are acknowledged for their efforts.
- electricslpnsld 8y agoGael Guennebaud. The Eigen library powers tons of numerical heavy code -- including Tensorflow -- but doesn't get much spotlight. Watching Eigen evolve under Gael's stewardship has been amazing.
- sam0x17 8y agoChris Hobbs / RX14 (major crystal language contributor) is 17 years old, is a genius, and is behind a lot of the recent work on the language including windows support, parallelism, and other things. You can follow him on GitHub or watch him work on crystal on twitch: https://github.com/rx14 https://github.com/rx14 | https://www.twitch.tv/rx14 https://www.twitch.tv/rx14
- jorgec 8y agoTWITTER!! Right now Twitter is what Xerox used to be in the 80's.
- voltagex_ 8y agoAnyone who makes sure stuff compiles and runs on Windows.
- JdeBP 8y agoIs there anyone at Microsoft that you would like to especially single out? (-:
- voltagex_ 8y agoI actually wasn't thinking about Microsoft in particular when I wrote this. Git for Windows, Audacity, Python are all good examples where people have put in a lot of work. On the Microsoft side, whoever's porting OpenSSH is pretty awesome, too.
- reeme 8y agoSerge Rider - DBeaver - the best open source multi database accesa tool. https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver . Daily commits, almost a one man show!
- sandebert 8y agoThat's an app I use daily. A couple of years back I tried to send him some money, as a way of showing appreciation for his work. He wasn't interested so I kind of assumed money wasn't an issue for him.
- kondro 8y agoConsider supporting George Nachman, creator of iTerm2 over at https://www.patreon.com/gnachman https://www.patreon.com/gnachman. iTerm2 seems to be the favourite terminal of macOS users… at least those that spend a large amount of their time there (especially with its native tmux support).
- dualbus 8y agoChet Ramey. He is the maintainer of the GNU Bash shell and of the GNU Readline line-editing library. * https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/ https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/ * https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/opinion/geek-of-the-week/chet-ramey-geek-of-the-week/ https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/opinion/geek-of-the-wee...
- nunez 8y agoThat dude that maintains jq. For those that haven't used it, it's like grep but for JSON (and about as fast).
- warp 8y agoJoey Hess: - https://liberapay.com/joeyh/ https://liberapay.com/joeyh/ - https://www.patreon.com/joeyh/overview https://www.patreon.com/joeyh/overview (I support Joey on patreon, as I use git-annex quite a bit)
- mabynogy 8y agoTerry A. Davis who is homeless at the moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS http://www.templeos.org/ http://www.templeos.org/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJZTn-fPu-uIA55UI47_cXg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJZTn-fPu-uIA55UI47_cXg
- settings11 8y agoFabrice Bellard.. He is already popular a bit... But most don't know about him....
- justinclift 8y agoDefinitely the DB Browser for SQLite team (sqlitebrowser.org). :) We recently created a Patron account, if that helps: https://www.patreon.com/db4s https://www.patreon.com/db4s