Not all open source projects are created equally. Many of them are valuable technologies, tackling complex issues from container compliance to deploying serverless applications to automating benchmarks for cloud infrastructure. Of course, this is only scratching the surface of the impact and range open source projects cover.
The beauty of open source projects lies in the creative, collaborative community that powers them. And sometimes, software developers and maintainers just wanna have fun! That certainly explains why these quirky, unusual and straight-up bizarre open source projects exist. No, this is not an April Fool’s prank—every single project below is real and reveling in its unabashed weirdness. Kick back, have a chuckle and enjoy these eight amusing open source oddities.
Technology has solved some of the biggest issues of our time, but ArnoldC boldly goes where no technology has gone before: uncovering the true semantics behind the one-liners of Arnold Schwarzenegger. This open source programming language employes computer science to discover new meanings from timeless Schwarzenegger sayings like, “Hasta la vista, baby!” and “Get to the chopper!” ArnoldC can even replace normal keywords and operators with phrases that sound very likely to be uttered by The Terminator himself.
Falsehood articles are a form of commentary that runs rampant in the developer community, mostly due to their effectiveness, convenience and brevity around a given subject. Developers generally turn to them when approaching unfamiliar domains in order to reveal inconsistencies and dispel common myths. The Awesome Falsehood open source project is a curated list of all the “gotcha!” falsehood articles that have tricked developers before, sort of like a go-to open source bank full of April Fool’s pranks.
If you’re looking to contribute to an open source project and have absolutely no coding experience whatsoever, No Code is the perfect entry point into the world of open source. Why’s that? Because this project lets you write nothing and deploy your code nowhere. The possibilities are truly endless, and No Code is only limited by your imagination. Its complete purposelessness is its greatest strength. When contributing to No Code, you’ll feel like you’ve done nothing at all…because you haven’t.
Have you ever wanted an adorable ASCII picture of a cow to deliver messages to or for you? Well then, it’s time you start using cowsay. Let’s face it, everything sounds better coming from a cow created by code. Not one to pigeon-hole itself, this open source program allows you to branch out of the cow pasture and generate pictures of other animals like penguins and the Linux mascot. cowsay that’s awesome!
The im2recipe open source project contains the code to train and evaluate models from the paper “Learning Cross-modal Embeddings for Cooking Recipes and Food Images.” In layman’s terms, you can basically convert an image of any food into a recipe that will allow you to actually make and savor it, all through open source code! Come to im2recipe with a big appetite and leave in a satisfying food coma.
Come on, come on, come on and do the locomotion with SL(1), the open source steam locomotive that can cure your bad typo habits. Well…it can help you cure one specific typo. If you find yourself typing a mile a minute and accidentally writing “sI” instead of “Is,” the steam locomotive will chug across your terminal to mercilessly shame you.
And now for cats!
Rainbows and unicorns and cats…oh my! Get them all, thanks to open source lolcat.
One of the internet’s reigning poster children, now in open source form!
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