The world is full of great ideas, from great literature, paintings, movies and even video games. Well, some people decide to turn great ideas into great software. This type of software, however, is called a project, and is part of the open source movement. There are plenty of such projects which you can find online, interesting and fun in their own way. Well, in order not to find such projects on your own, here are a couple of interesting open source projects which you could read about more, or even contribute to, if you are willing and able.

MAME – Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator

This is one of those projects which everyone who grew up in the 80s and 90s is familiar with, because they all played video games on huge arcade cabinets in arcades all over the world. Well, some of them will find it very interesting that MAME covers almost all arcade cabinet games and allows you to play them on multiple devices, and multiple operating systems. Written primarily in C++, it is not an easy project to contribute to, but given how much work could be done on so many levels, you could definitely find a way to contribute. If you know C++ and are a fan of old school games, then this project should be the one for you to work on. It is also interesting to newer gamers, who haven’t experienced the good old games which tend to be brutally challenging and difficult, unforgiving and without savegames.

Vue.js

This is a framework meant to work with Javascript. It does so many things right and is one of the most popular projects on GitHub. It is also a project which many developers who work with Javascript swear by. They use this framework to make their lives easier, and their software, better. It is actually great for making user interfaces and single page applications. With so many contributors and downloads, it is definitely one of the more progressive projects out there.

TensorFlow

Revealed and developed in 2015 by Google, or rather their Brain Team, TensorFlow is the key to Skynet. Wait, what?! No, actually, it is a deep learning framework, or rather, a machine learning framework meant for dataflow. TensorFlow is used in various ways, mostly for speech recognition, searching photos and translation. It is one of the most popular projects and for a good reason, given how everyone is interested in deep learning and AIs, all of a sudden.

These are some of the most interesting open source projects that exist today. There certainly are more, like VLC, which is a simple video and audio player, but with tons of functionality. Have fun exploring more interesting projects, or even contributing to them if you have the knowhow.