Inspirational Projects

Over the years that the FLOSS Fund has been running, I have been surprised that people have such a hard time finding projects to nominate. I run into neat projects frequently.

I feel kind of squicky giving you a list (I am NOT suggesting that y'all nominate these projects), but maybe you can use this list to inspire yourself:

  1. FreePOPs, a neat POP3 proxy I used to rescue my e-mail from Yahoo!'s servers.
  2. Cacti, which is a great tool for graphing network activity.
  3. pfSense, which is a pretty nifty firewall project.
  4. TinyMCE, which is one of the two major JavaScript editors that let you do rich-text formatting in text fields. Maybe you're too cool to use it, but lack of WYSIWYG support on the web hobbles many people.
  5. OpenWRT, which has converted many a consumer-grade router into something featureful.
  6. TrueCrypt, which (although not perfect and not DSFG-free) is an excellent cross-platform no-cost encryption tool that even non-technical users can use.
  7. VLC, which makes multimedia tolerable on Free Software platforms.
  8. Imagemagick. Ha ha who uses Imagemagick anymore, right? You might be surprised.
  9. Squid, which is an immensely popular proxy/cache.

These are a few projects which I use and which I find useful (even inspirational). You probably have some too. Even if you don't nominate them for the FLOSS Fund, it is worth thinking about them and appreciating them.