Nothing and everything.

There are thousands if not millions of open source solutions scattered around society. Some are feature complete, most are not. Some are maintained, many are not. A handful are funded, the rest is not.

What open source needs, more than anything else is fundraising and the means to distribute those funds to the tune of the trillions of dollars that the corporate world extracts in profits from those open source efforts.

In other words, the people who make this need to get paid.

Firefox terms and conditions, Red Hat, and several other projects that have caused uproar through the community, are all caused by the need to get paid to eat food and have a roof over your head whilst you contribute to society and give away your efforts.

games! in maybe 95% of cases you can find an open alternative to some (non-game) software, but with games it's the opposite.

i would say that the main proprietary softwares i still use, are video games

A mesh network internet, it's more of a hardware, security, and adoption problem but at this point there's enough wifi overlap in most residential areas that entire towns could have their own local internet without needing the ISP model at all.

A. Phone.

The EU managed to get Meta on their knees with GDPR. They could force unlocked bootloader and easy install of any OS on phones just like on laptop/pc. I believe then we would really get the Linux phone movement going. Imagine: iPhone with UBports.

A project to give me money in exchange for me writing software.

A high performance RISC-V CPU core.

Most anything related to healthcare:

• System for medics and nurses to input all the data of a patient, which can be accessed by said patient if need be
• System for keeping track of vaccines applied and pinging people who need to take more shots (second dose, reinforcement dose, etc)
• drivers and programs to interact with medical equipment

A fitness tracker app that rivals Strava.

At the minute, a true open source and free browser/web engine, though I know this is nigh impossible to maintain without thousands of people. Some part of me is hopeful though given recent events.

A printer or printer firmware. There was a discussion about this elsewhere on lemmy, of course this would be difficult and expensive but it would be very cool

for me the most critical ones are replacements for discord and microsoft teams. for discord the critical piece is the login - people don't want to make accounts on each server, so until we have proper federation with a good user experience people won't actually move off it.

for teams i'm sure theres projects in development, i just don't know them or their status - all i know is that i want a project to combine several specialized FOSS services (jitsi is great, and there's lots of other collaboration tools for email/calendar/chat) into one nice unified frontend that is actually reasonably easy to self-host and maintain.

It you're looking for ideas-- Something you're passionate about. Find a problem you're having, fix it, and make it open source. That's the best way to make sure whatever you do doesn't get abandoned. Good luck

Openly available traffic data that follows a reliable standard.

I would really like to see something like Jellyfin/Komga but for sheet music. There’s a software in early development called Sheetable that stores it in PDF format, but I really want to see something that has MusicXML support so that sheets can be played back.

Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin could use some help

Tax software. It's the only reason I keep a windows VM.

Idk if there's a os music sheet software somewhere but if someone know one i am interested

A Wayland reimplementation of XMonad.

I have no clue yet if an open source solution exists, but I'm just getting started volunteering with a local animal rescue, and they definitely need a better solution for records management.

I've been wanting to try to leave Windows for Linux, but I just can't find a replacement for AutoHotkey that can do everything that it can. It would have to be some kind of weird combination of various Python libraries, AutoKey, and Espanso, and even then it's either not as easy or downright convoluted at best.

I also can't find any FOSS image editor that can do this.

Something similar to splitwise.

I'd like a local filesharing option. Where a single folder would be synced in my phone from home computer when I'm at home, and from work computer and phone when I'm at work. Without using cloud sync between them only when I'm physically traveling between them, that's good enough for most use cases of cloud sync that I want for work.

DNS management. Think something like InfoBlox where I can have GUI driven control from simple adding a new zone record all the way up to full anycast configuration.

I love the terminal and CLIs to death but zone files suck and setting up bind or unbound/nsd is more painful than it should be.

A manga chapter/volume manager similar to sonarr/radarr/readarr that can download with or similar to fmd2/hdoujin downloader/mihon

Joining an existing project would be more helpful.