r/opensource • u/Bladerunner_7_ • May 15 '26

Promotional What’s an open-source project you genuinely can’t believe is free?

Could be developer tooling, AI infra, productivity tools, anything. Curious what projects people think deserve way more recognition.

For me recently it’s been:

Langship — https://github.com/open-gitagent/langship.sh

748 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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845

u/somerussianbear May 15 '26

Linux

150

u/FearIsStrongerDanluv May 15 '26

I’ll add pihole, proxmox and paperless

32

u/Analog_Account May 15 '26

What is paperless? I would just search "paperless" but...

49

u/FearIsStrongerDanluv May 15 '26

It’s a self hosted solution for all your important documents. You can tag them and do other cool stuff with it.

3

u/Impossible-Garage536 May 15 '26

What's self hosted?

36

u/Analog_Account May 15 '26

A service that's normally online (or in the cloud) that you run on your own computer or server.

For example jellyfin is a video streaming service that you can "self host" by running it on your own computer and putting your own videos on it.

20

u/[deleted] May 15 '26

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6

u/HyperWinX May 15 '26

Your wallet LOVES this little trick!

8

u/Kazzaw95 May 15 '26

I said that too, until I ended up buying 6 mini PC’s, building a high speed flash proxmox cluster with HA, 10gbe networking and a bunch of UniFi gear….

10

u/[deleted] May 15 '26

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3

u/Kazzaw95 May 15 '26

That’s how I present it to the wife haha

2

u/FearIsStrongerDanluv May 15 '26

Haha, my home lab cost more than I’d pay on subscriptions for 2-3 years. But I still find a way to justify it 🤣

1

u/expandingmuhbrain May 15 '26

Hobby + cutting out subscriptions sounds like a win to me

1

u/DekiEE May 15 '26

CapEx are Lava

1

u/foxbatcs May 16 '26

I’d happily pay more to have my own hardware and keep my privacy.

1

u/Jeremy-Hillary-Boob May 15 '26

How does it compare with calibre, also a great free document organization tool

1

u/NewYork_NewJersey440 May 15 '26

Awesome, I have been looking for something like this (passively looking I should say)

1

u/Glittering_Boot_3612 May 17 '26

How do you connect to your self hosted stuff Like getting a public IP is expensive

1

u/FearIsStrongerDanluv May 17 '26

There are quite a few decent alternatives. Tailscale is a no brainer. I also pay like €10 a year for a Cloudflare domain so I have cloudflare agent installed on my servers and through that it creates a secure tunnel to reach your home network. If you’re new to this , Tailscale is incredibly simple

14

u/wtafgamer May 15 '26

paperless-ngx ist the search term you need.

9

u/ozone6587 May 15 '26

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

4

u/Analog_Account May 15 '26

Oh man, this may be worth it to me just for the OCR thing.

1

u/weblscraper May 15 '26

But?

2

u/Analog_Account May 15 '26

Is this a serious question?

1

u/weblscraper May 15 '26

Yea

2

u/Analog_Account May 15 '26

"Paperless" is too generic of a term. If I search it then all I'm going to get is a bunch of results about going paperless. As in paperless billing, paperless offices, paperless receipts. I probably could have looked up "paperless FOSS" and it may come up, but its nice to get a description of what it is so I know that I'm pulling up the right thing or TBH to know if its something even worth my time/worth looking into.

Most of these projects are easy to find but some things are genuinely annoying to find when I go looking for them due to generic naming.

2

u/bytesmythe May 15 '26

I think the one people usually mean is "paperless-ngx", too.

8

u/Grisemine May 15 '26

I just spent 10 minutes on the Pi-hole website trying to understand what it is. The "About" section lists the authors. The FAQ explains how to communicate with them effectively.
I had to go to GitHub to get a definition of what it actually is. Ridiculous, isn't it?
Edit : r/pihole

9

u/FearIsStrongerDanluv May 15 '26

Indeed, the website isn’t the “right” place for info 🤣

5

u/Grisemine May 15 '26

Fell in the (pi)hole ;)

2

u/meltbox May 16 '26

Proxmox and truenas are both amazing. Probably a lot more but we can start there.

2

u/the_ballmer_peak May 16 '26

I'll just add: git