cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22266569

Looking for Mentor (for a PhD Candidate) that works with open source and Rust

TLDR: Searching for person holding professor position to officially act as a committee member on a US PhD defense

Hi all,

I'm in a non CS field. I'm doing PhD in hydrology and I'm good at Geospatial Analysis, data analysis, visualization, modeling and such. I really like programming and have been making open source programs, contributing to open source programs and such. And have been learning rust for last 2 years.

For my PhD dissertation I'm doing a project where I'll be using Rust to make a program with compiled plugin system that can do generalized river related tasks including data analysis and visualization. I have professors in GIS and hydrology to guide those aspects, but I don't have anyone on software side to ask questions, or to look at my work. I tried emailing some people I have seen with open source projects on GIS+rust, but no response.

I'm ideally looking for someone that holds a professor position for my committee who is good with either rust, GIS related algorithms development, and programming languages. However, it woud also be helpful to just have someone woth knowledge about such things. In either scenario, credit and authorship will be given.

I appreciate any response even telling where i could find someone matching the above description. :)

Edit: I can also provide my previous projects in GitHub, websites and such before you decide in messages.

TLDR: I recently found out there is "deprecated" XFA format that acrobat still uses in their programs, and government forms have those for dynamic contents in the form that we cannot fill using other softwares. Looking for solutions.

This has been a problem since a long time. Back in 2020 I had dual boot because I needed acrobat to fill PDF forms, but after finding xournal++ program I nuked windows partition. Windows update messing up grub was one of the reason I decided to nuke windows and looking at the posts recently it's still a huge issue.

So the problem I recently encountered is that even the government issued PDF forms need acrobat reader (which is free software for PDF, but only available in windows and mac). Which I didn't think would be an issue and just filled the form in Firefox.

Turns out that was problematic as the PDF forms has fields that are automatically filled, calculated from other fields, only made available when certain checkboxes are checked, etc. and Firefox doesn't support that. Even trying to install the acrobat reader snap (which uses wine) in a VM and opening the PDF on it didn't work. The UI makes me think it's a really old version of the reader.

So without searching for other devices (and filling a PDF with my sensitive information) what solution is there? Installing windows is a hassle even in a VM, and it will use up precious SSD memory. But that's the only solution I can think of.

I also found masterpdf or something like that which the Arch wiki says has support for that, but it didn't work. It says XFA forms are converted to acro forms, and the dynamic part doesn't work. There are websites that promise to work for such forms, but I'm not going to be putting sensitive info on web apps.

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping there are people here who work on FOSS and have applied for grants to support their software financially. I am applying for a grant opportunity that is asking for a software from US gov agency.

My requirements:

• I want to publish it under Open Source Licenses like GPL (not MIT) so other corps can't take this to use on their product,
• The grant agency will get the source code, they can do whatever as long as the license is held,
• I will develop the features they want, and request during the duration of grant,
• I will want to continue development independently after the grant, or apply for more grants from other organizations,
• To clarify the previous point, I do not want to give them the final product so they own it, and I can no longer do anything on the program.

So, if anyone has done similar things, please give me advice on this. Their requirement says "a web repository" should be provided at the end, so I think I can apply with the intention of giving them the software code while keeping the rights. But I don't want to make a mistake in application/contract and lost the rights to the program, I want to develop a lot further than just the features they want for their use case.

Or at least dual license to protect the Open Source Side while giving the grant organization rights to take the code for their other programs because of the money they spent.