Open source project ideas

[cobalt_s]

Hi all, I'm itching to start working on a decently sized open source project of my own, but I'm not sure what it should be.

I'd like to be an open source alternative to a piece of software that you would normally only find in a business/ corporate world.

The software shouldn't have any (or any decent) open source alternatives.

As a example, one of the suggestions that I received and am considering is payroll management software.

Thank you for reading. All suggestions are appreciated.

 

[Raatle]

You gonna have to get pretty creative for corporate. Your example is already covered: Open Source Payroll Management Software System | Open HRMS

Maybe look at developing a whole pipeline, for example: a web framework that parses a directory of excel spreadsheets into "card" like graphs.

Whats your development background?

 

[cobalt_s]

You gonna have to get pretty creative for corporate. Your example is already covered: Open Source Payroll Management Software System | Open HRMS

Maybe look at developing a whole pipeline, for example: a web framework that parses a directory of excel spreadsheets into "card" like graphs.

Whats your development background?

I didn't look too far into it. I guess they have payroll covered.

My background is mostly in .Net web application development for the financial sector.

 

[Raatle]

Do this: GitHub - preactjs/signals: Manage state with style in every framework but for .Net. I think this is where web develpment is heading.

 

[Will_I_Am]

My two cents:

Maybe start with something smaller, a utility or tool of some sort, which can be used by other developers. As someone mentioned there already is an open source payroll implementation - but let's say there was not, that will be a BIG undertaking. Not to kill your aspirations, but to stay motivated on that for an extended period of time, will be difficult. Unless it picks up quickly and other people start getting involved. And be on the lookout for ideas - usually they arise out of a need you see with the work you currently do and not necessarily by "thinking hard" about ideas. The best ideas seem to come when you don't search for them.

But please let us know if you do find something!

 

[NemoXX7]

Here's a pitch, and you can have this one for free (use it or lose it).

Issue: I have multiple external hard drives with all my photos over the years stored across them, some might be duplicates and most were just dumped and not put into folders or categorised.
I want to consolidate everything onto one drive, preferably on the cloud so I can access them from anywhere and move away from old HDD's.
They can be categorised into folders that make sense like the name of the event or even just categorised by year. Hell even just based on date taken is fine. Some sort of logical order making sure there are no duplicates.

Proposal: It would be nice to have an application that uses AI facial recognition on image files and can tell me which photos are duplicates and perhaps even sort the photos based on date taken or year or even who appears in them, this will solve the issue of me having to look through 100GB+ of images and manually sort them which would take weeks.

I believe some such AI facial recognition is already used by Facebook and Google Photos, so maybe that can be a discovery point.

 

[definitelynotblackbeard]

Hi all, I'm itching to start working on a decently sized open source project of my own, but I'm not sure what it should be.

I'd like to be an open source alternative to a piece of software that you would normally only find in a business/ corporate world.

The software shouldn't have any (or any decent) open source alternatives.

As a example, one of the suggestions that I received and am considering is payroll management software.

Thank you for reading. All suggestions are appreciated.

I agree with some of the other folks here saying that payroll or financial systems is quite the undertaking. In general any system with some sort of compliance situation will be difficult to get people to adopt cause as a corporation I wouldn't want to use a system that might make us non-compliant with SARS etc.

My opinion (not that I am any sort of authority figure on this) is to do one of two things:

1. Build small single use utilities and make it open source. Make utilities that do 1 thing but does it exceptionally well. With clean code, documentation etc. This will build out your open source portfolio and then hopefully help you build a community that will work with you when you shoot for the bigger ERP or payroll project.

2. Collaborate on existing open source projects (like bitwarden or something). This will not only show you how open source communities work together (which will help you when you launch your own massive project) but it also allows you to have an instant impact on open source by helping to improve widely adopted open source tools for everyone.

Just to finish this off, thanks for your interest on open source. People like yourself who create and share for the common good make the world go round!

 

[eyesuc]

Here's a pitch, and you can have this one for free (use it or lose it).

Issue: I have multiple external hard drives with all my photos over the years stored across them, some might be duplicates and most were just dumped and not put into folders or categorised.
I want to consolidate everything onto one drive, preferably on the cloud so I can access them from anywhere and move away from old HDD's.
They can be categorised into folders that make sense like the name of the event or even just categorised by year. Hell even just based on date taken is fine. Some sort of logical order making sure there are no duplicates.

Proposal: It would be nice to have an application that uses AI facial recognition on image files and can tell me which photos are duplicates and perhaps even sort the photos based on date taken or year or even who appears in them, this will solve the issue of me having to look through 100GB+ of images and manually sort them which would take weeks.

I believe some such AI facial recognition is already used by Facebook and Google Photos, so maybe that can be a discovery point.

The duplicate issue sounds like a relatively easy solve. Make a hash for each file, if hash exists it is a dupe. However, a quick google seems to indicate there are loads of options out there, even open source ones.

The facial recognition thing can also be solved, but using AWS Rekognition will probably cost a bit of money. Easiest would just be to upload all your pics to Google Photos and tag the faces, but for a large amount of photos it will also cost money.

EDIT: Ja neh? Getting tired and didn't notice it is a necro.