[Gllug] Thoughts on the breadth of Free Software

[Richard Jones]

On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 02:12:19PM +0100, Dan Stevens (IAmAI) wrote:
> I've got my final year of university coming up and as a result, I have
> to start thinking about my dissertation. I'm aspiring to develop
> something to become ultimately free software that might be useful to
> at least some people. I have a few ideas for projects but I thought it
> would be interesting to find out people's opinion on the breadth of
> free software and if anyone considers free software lacks in providing
> in certain areas or something where they wish there was a free
> software solution. I guess aspiring to create something someone might
> actually want to use and actually doing it well enough so they do, are
> two very different things, but perhaps at least if I choose something
> that hasn't been done before as free software it would mean I won't be
> competing with an older, probably better written project and perhaps
> someone may even be grateful for it :) I'd be grateful of any thoughts
> people might have.

You might try adding a feature to an existing program.  For my
dissertation I added bounds checking to gcc, and the work which I did
is still being developed:
http://www.network-theory.co.uk/articles/boundschecking.html

Some ideas off the top of my head:

* Work on some innovative human-computer interactions for GNOME (or
KDE if you prefer).

* It'd be great if PostgreSQL could optimise itself - creating indexes
on the fly.  Take a demanding web application, examine the queries it
uses most often, and work out which indexes need to be added to
optimise it.

Rich.

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Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
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