Ask HN: Who are some unsung heroes in open source that need more support?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17445280

by notaplumber • 8 years ago

177 118 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

rajeshbatralive• 8 years ago

https://github.com/wajahatkarim3

sattoshi• 8 years ago

Who is he?

rajeshbatra• 8 years ago

he call himself Wantrepreneur, https://github.com/wajahatkarim3/MediumClap-Android

nagVenkat• 8 years ago

Please support GNU Octave if you can.

fiveFeet• 8 years ago

I 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.

poster1232• 8 years ago

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.

dnautics• 8 years ago

I used to use and love GNU octave, but much prefer Julia these days, which is also open-source.

neom• 8 years ago

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).

https://github.com/ednapiranha https://github.com/progrium https://github.com/dominictarr

https://github.com/substack https://github.com/balupton

nategri2• 8 years ago

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.

2015 article: https://www.informationweek.com/it-life/ntp-harlan-stenn-and...

bradknowles2• 8 years ago

Indeed, 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!

bradknowles2• 8 years ago

NB: I am an unpaid volunteer for the NTF and the NTP Public Services Project at ntp.org.

robertk• 8 years ago

Notoriety means infamy, or the state of being well known for something terrible. Did you mean a different word?

nategri2• 8 years ago

Thank you, yes, it's been corrected---"visibility" serves the purpose I intended.

nkkollaw• 8 years ago

Really? I didn't know that,in Italian it a similar word translates into "famous". I wonder how many times I've used it incorrectly...

dvirsky6• 8 years ago

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

dvirsky6• 8 years ago

Two 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/

* Ardour - pretty well known I think, but only in the narrow cross-section of audio geeks and Linux geeks. https://ardour.org/

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aaronarduino4• 8 years ago

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.

https://ardour.org/

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j452• 8 years ago

Wow. Am I missing something or is Ardour a more capable kind of Audacity?

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dvirsky6• 8 years ago

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.

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aaronarduino4• 8 years ago

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.

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dvirsky6• 8 years ago

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.

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aaronarduino4• 8 years ago

I hope so! I think the MixBus team has contributed some code back to Ardour.

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BoysenberryPi• 8 years ago

I looked into Ardour when looking for a linux DAW but the lack of a piano roll makes it immediately no go for me

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tribidi• 8 years ago

There is a piano roll, you just need to vertically expand a MIDI track in order to see it.

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sincerely• 8 years ago

how does ardour compare to ableton?

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ravenstine2• 8 years ago

Jonathan Thomas over at Openshot Video Editor:

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.

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dvirsky6• 8 years ago

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.

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bufferoverflow• 8 years ago

Davinci Resolve blows everything else out of the water, and it's free. Available for Linux, Win, Mac.

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ravenstine2• 8 years ago

Not open source. There's nothing wrong with that, except it's not what we're talking about here.

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inspector14• 8 years ago

SparkleShare / 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.

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phkahler2• 8 years ago

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...

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sldenazis• 8 years ago

Ornicar[0], author of lila[1], the chess server behind the greatest chess site of internet[2].

[0] https://github.com/ornicar [1] https://github.com/ornicar/lila/ [2] https://lichess.org/

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BerislavLopac• 8 years ago

Ben Darnell of Tornado and Mike Bayer (aka zzzeek) of SQLAlchemy.

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zzzeek• 8 years ago

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!)

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toufka• 8 years ago

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.

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.

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brynet4• 8 years ago

With my OpenBSD developer hat on, hardware donations welcome here too: https://www.openbsd.org/want.html

cough-- I also very much like pizza: https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html

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brynet4• 8 years ago

The OpenBSD foundation also hasn't received any corporate donations as of yet for 2018:

https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html

https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2018.html

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busterarm• 8 years ago

cough-- I also very much like pizza: https://brynet.biz.tm/wallofpizza.html

But is it Pizza Pizza?

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brynet4• 8 years ago

I'll eat Pizza from anywhere! Even Pizza Pizza.

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haddadda• 8 years ago

openmhealth.org - we're build an open data standard for mobile health data.

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notatoad• 8 years ago

PSA: nominating yourself in threads like this is pretty tactless.

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brynet4• 8 years ago

Guilty.

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willow98862• 8 years ago

Why? 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?

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jstarfish• 8 years ago

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.

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hutzlibu• 8 years ago

Well, calling yourself a unsung hero ... is maybe a bit, well, low. Usually others judge, who is a hero.

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ljw10014• 8 years ago

Calling people tactless after they've worked their asses off building something they give to strangers for free is more tactless.

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justinclift2• 8 years ago

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. ;)

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willow98862• 8 years ago

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:

https://gluu.org/docs/ce

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ljw10014• 8 years ago

Ironically, 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.

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brutus1213• 8 years ago

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.

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dbrgn• 8 years ago

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.

Here you can find a LibrePCB introduction video from this year's FOSDEM: https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/cad_librepcb/

(Edit: Punctuation)

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cbHXBY1D2• 8 years ago

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.

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phkahler2• 8 years 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.

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georgecalm• 8 years ago

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

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FLGMwt• 8 years ago

Babel has some crazy throughput going through it to drive a massive percentage of the modern web. Wild to see how low the funding is.

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swyx• 8 years ago

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.

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TAForObvReasons2• 8 years ago

Babel has an open collective: https://opencollective.com/babel

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sheetjs• 8 years ago

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.

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makx• 8 years ago

Shotcut Video Editor: https://shotcut.org/

- and -

Natron video compositing software: https://natron.fr/

Both are great tools with a steady stream of updates.

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petrohi• 8 years ago

Loïc Hoguin. The author of Cowboy web server. De facto standard web server in Erlang/Elixir. Foundation for Plug and Phoenix frameworks.

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porsager• 8 years ago

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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panoply• 8 years ago

Don’t sell yourself short porsager, you’re apart of that finely tuned Mithril machine too.

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bckmn• 8 years ago

There's an NPM package started for this: https://github.com/feross/thanks

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tvlooy• 8 years ago

OpenBSD is heavily underfunded compared to what value they deliver. See https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html

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zacharycarter• 8 years ago

Araq and the other Nim core developers.

OpenBSD core developers.

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koala_man2• 8 years ago

All 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!

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AnIdiotOnTheNet• 8 years ago

I 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?

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heyoni• 8 years ago

I’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.

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kosma• 8 years ago

Because 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.

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jquast• 8 years ago

Upvote from me, I fully agree with you. I'm sick and tired of people re-packaging python/npm/ruby/etc applications as distro packages. As a maintainer of a few high-traffic python libraries, it wastes my time. I am not ok with it.

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jessaustin• 8 years ago

A lot of the strength of open source comes (much like in computation in general) from chopping tasks into smaller and smaller pieces. The upstream developer is unlikely to be skilled at packaging for a number of different platforms. If platform users can rely on others who are skilled at packaging, we all benefit.

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mmt5• 8 years ago

I disagree that it's a waste of time. (But I upvoted, because I think it's an important question, thereby adding to the conversation).

for so many different package repositories and packaging formats?

How many are there, though, really? In theory, the number is unbounded, but, in practice the number of distros is modest, the number of popular ones is smaller, and the number of unique packaging formats even smaller.

Although a sibling comment alluded to it with distros being internally consistent, I wanted to unpack that a bit more.

Specifically, one benefit I've found as a "user" (sysadmin/devops) is that of well-defined dependencies. This isn't inherent to packaging, but it tends to be a feature of the more mature systems and distros.

The other benefit is that it provides a more universal mechanism of traceability and, thereby, at least a path to reproducibility of builds. This has implications for security, of course, but also for debugging.

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belorn• 8 years ago

The biggest reason, both historical and present, that we have many different package repositories and packaging formats is because of the concept of shared libraries and the desired benefits: security, stability, speed, freshness of volatile data and disk usage.

And from what I have seen there is only a primary alternative being proposed; containers. Have a copy of all needed libraries in every package and leave it to the developer to patch and fix security. Occasionally put a few things into the operating system, but then you have to hope that those parts don't change or you have to make different packages for different version of the operating system.

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voltagex_5• 8 years ago

The flipside of this is I think packaging for Debian has become far, far too difficult.

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ymse• 8 years ago

As someone who has packaged a lot of software for Debian, CentOS, Gentoo, NixOS, and GNU Guix, I have to agree -- it's by far the most difficult platform.

I actually believe much of the Docker hype can be attributed to this. Why bother learning packaging when you can just script something and throw it in a container.

Now I just use Guix on any distro for my up-to-date/custom software needs.

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kartiksura• 8 years ago

RIBS2 (Robust Infrastructure for Backend Systems, ver. 2) 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.

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blzaugg• 8 years ago

Jon 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/ [1] http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize-css/#overview [2] https://github.com/csstools/sanitize.css [3] https://github.com/jonathantneal/svg4everybody [4] https://github.com/aFarkas/html5shiv#who-can-i-get-mad-at-no... [5] https://jonneal.bandcamp.com/track/yayquery [6] https://github.com/himynameisdave/postcss-plugins/blob/maste... [7] https://www.npmjs.com/~jonathantneal

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TAForObvReasons2• 8 years ago

The html5shiv was originally based on a discovery by 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...

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threeseed• 8 years ago

Sébastien 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.

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mrburton• 8 years ago

Shay 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.

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electricslpnsld• 8 years ago

Gael 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.

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sam0x17• 8 years ago

Chris 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://www.twitch.tv/rx14

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voltagex_5• 8 years ago

Anyone who makes sure stuff compiles and runs on Windows.

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JdeBP• 8 years ago

Is there anyone at Microsoft that you would like to especially single out? (-:

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voltagex_5• 8 years ago

I 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.

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reeme• 8 years ago

Serge Rider - DBeaver - the best open source multi database accesa tool. https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver . Daily commits, almost a one man show!

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sandebert• 8 years ago

That'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.

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kondro• 8 years ago

Consider supporting George Nachman, creator of iTerm2 over at 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).

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dualbus• 8 years ago

Chet 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://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/opinion/geek-of-the-wee...

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nunez• 8 years ago

That dude that maintains jq. For those that haven't used it, it's like grep but for JSON (and about as fast).

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warp• 8 years ago

Joey Hess: