I would give it all to BOINC !boinc@sopuli.xyz. I donate time and money to this project on a regular basis, but I wish more people knew about BOINC because projects like this give me faith in humanity. BOINC is a open source tool scientists can use to distribute massive computational workloads to the computers of volunteers. Any scientist can use it without institutional backing or approval, it's an open network operating on the petaflop scale. Users can choose which projects they compute for.

BOINC has been used for medical research, finding new asteroids, and identifying new particles at the Large Hadron Collider. Anybody remember seti@home? Ran on BOINC. BOINC was also used to make the first accurate 3D model of the sars-cov-2 spike protein and even helped lead to the design of a shelf-stable vaccine which was distributed to millions. Plus, the project Minecraft@home used it to find the tallest cactus. BOINC has resulted in hundreds of scientific papers that without BOINC would never have gotten funded due to the cost and complexity of the computation involved.

But there is some serious technical debt and usability issues and BOINC has a long-term trend of declining userbase.

For me it would be:

• Helix: Great editor but needs a lot of development
• Lemmy: 3rd party frontends would have a hard time to catch up with changes, but it's worth it anyway
• GNU: they could update some stuff and also hurd kernel looks really interesting
• Arch Linux: maybe they would improve wiki or write some software to make life easier on arch
• .NET: I know that microsoft bad but I really like .NET, and it's devs are doing really nice stuff. And it's FOSS
• LibreOffice: they could integrate LLMs into their apps maybe
• Wayland: why not?
• Firefox: maybe they will improve performance and catch up with some css features
• Hyprland: it's working fine at it's current state, but it always can be better
• Nouveau: it would be a nice alternative to proprietary nvidia drivers

If I’m thinking about projects that could benefit the most from an exponential increase in active developers:

• Wine/Proton (could have a fantastic windows runtime on every *nix platform)
• ReactOS (lot of potential for a windows 7/10 upgrade path)
• Mozilla Firefox (would help with API parity with chromium)
• GIMP (but only if they agree to change the stupid name)

The rest goes to package managers and other lower-level projects that don’t get enough of a spotlight, maybe Brew or Curl or something.

Kubernetes so that it can peak already and then die off.

Disclaimer - I make a living on k8s based solutions and I’m over the stupid complexity for little benefit. It’s like expecting everyone to be a “10x” engineer or some shit when reality is that most of us are just over here sniffing glue.

• AOSP(Android open source project)
• Linux
• designing one low level emulator
• making my own game engine
• reverse engineering and source code recovery of my childhood games.
• writing firmware for my personal laptop and phone so, it runs on fully on open source code.
• writing my own compiler and JIT runtime.
• making my own Standard C Lib.
• write my own minimal Desktop environment based on wayland without using graphics library like QT and GTK.
• i also want to write my own hypervisor.

(I explain and link to the ones that I don't think everyone here would know about)

• Lemmy

• ActivityPub

• Firefox (Chromium should go the way of IE)

• Godot

• WINE

• Cinnamon (the desktop environment developed for Linux Mint, so we can get Wayland support)

• Box86/Box64

• Darling (macOS compatibility layer for Linux, plans to support running iOS apps when running on on ARM machines in the future, I want this primarily for iOS preservation purposes)

• Xemu (Original Xbox emulator, OG Xboxes are some of the most failure prone consoles and a game I want to play still has serious issues)

• Haiku (mostly for really nerdy shits and giggles honestly, but there's a part of me that thinks it could be a better consumer grade FOSS OS than GNU/Linux if it were more developed and had any actual software support. As it stands, like it's proprietary predecessor BeOS, it's just a toy. It's no less stupid than investing your theoretical time in Hurd IMO)

I've got a few that are similar to other posts in here, but what I'd really like is an open source game similar to The Sims. Specifically, one that tries to achieve the goals of Sims 3.

Sims 3 could have been an amazing game, but EA half-assed it making mediocre content and not fixing bugs.

If the game was open source, all those bugs would be fixed, the game would be optimized, and it would still be relevant today. But while open source is great for maintaining and improving big software projects, it's not good for creating them in the first place. So that's where I'd put ten years of development - creating an open source life simulation game.

I'm going to start with a couple projects that don't already exist.

• Something like the AUR but for non executable content like movies or books. I'm imagining something like;
  (program name) -m (medium, eg. Book, magazine, article (or "print" for any text document) Show, Movie (or video for any video document) and so on) (search term)

• A project that allows a full installed-in-place Linux installation with grub and all, no USB drive required. If that's a two stage thing where it partitions a section of the drive then installs an installer there, then reboots to that installer, or some other thing doesn't matter. No, not whatever Ubuntu used to do, I mean a proper installation.

• A program that tricks lan games into playing in side by side couch coop. I've figured out a method for doing this using multiseat on swayWM but it's pretty complicated and touchy.

• An open source car computer software. Not for the infotainment.

• An open source printer that works.

• A liquid democracy voting system

Things that actually exist:

• Minetest, specifically creating tools to help existing Minecraft mods be ported over.

• GIMP

• IPFS, try to get it in use in more places by default (AUR seems promising?)

• Wine

figure out a way to slam all 100 years into cybersyn related projects. kill pinochet with a mech made out of bakelite and woodgrain paneling

Coreboot, NixOS, Firefox, Lemmy, Briar, Gemini, Calibre, Godot, MIRI (though admittedly that one is maybe less of a 'software project per se, so if that doesn't count i'll say 100 Rabbits just cause i think their stuff is neat) and i think i'll take the last decade for my own personal project(s).

Linux kernel

OpenBSD

Gnu Hurd

Debian

Tor

Fdroid

SteamOS

Vulkan / DXVK

Wayland

Firefox

• Godot Engine
• OnlyOffice
• Appflowy
• Affine.pro
• Debian
• Forgejo/Gittea
• Blender
• Linux Mint
• Postgresql

1. KDE Project
2. Wayland
3. Open source drivers (especially Nvidia)
4. Lemmy
5. Mastadon
6. Scribus
7. Nextcloud
8. Firefox
9. Tutanota suite
10. Wine

Honestly, there's a lot of great answers in this thread. Personally, I'd love to see a FOSS ttrpg manager. Talking a complete library of monsters, races, classes, etc., along with an optimized pipeline for homebrewed stuff. Tools for encounter, battlemap, NPC and campaign flow creation.

Closest thing is 5e Companion App but it doesn't have a PC client, isn't FOSS, has a lot of weird limitations and UX/UI issues (like multiclassing could be simpler, and its really frustrating that you can't level down a character after all the work you did, forcing you to do it all over again just to change classes and spells). Also DnD next but getting source books for a whole player session is expensive.

Dwarf Fortress, and then the other nine I'd have to think about.