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If you could give 10 years of development time to up to 10 software projects, which would you choose? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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You can choose up to 10 software projects.
Each project receives 10 years of development time as if all the programmers worked continuously for that duration, following their current working methods.
After choosing these 10 (or less) projects, everything else remains unchanged in the world, as if time has been frozen for 10 years.

Which projects do you choose?

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I would give it all to BOINC [email protected]. 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.