Panther Software and Research Company

Panther Software and Research Company (psr.com), located in South Carolina (U.S.), mainly does software R&D (i.e., "services", not "retail products"). As a service to the community at large, below are some worthwhile and interesting projects.

Distributed computing projects

These projects only require your computer's time. If your computer (or, in some cases, even your cellphone) is on but frequently idle, and it has an Internet connection at least once in a while, you can use its idle time to contribute to your choice of distributed computing projects. The project software runs at low priority, so that your work always comes first and only the time your computer would have been idle is donated.

Many of the distributed computing projects below use Berkeley's BOINC management software. Projects using it benefit from having a standardized way of managing work units among a large number of computers. Volunteers get the ability to participate in multiple projects if they wish, and can limit run times, resource use, etc. The underlying BOINC software is available for Android, MS Windows(x86, x64), Mac OS X (PPC, x86, x64, Apple silicon), Linux(x86, x64, ARM), and Raspbian (Raspberry Pi). Not all project's software can run on all platforms, however.

Here are just a few of the many distributed computing projects looking for donated computer time:

Folding@Home (protein folding calculations) and Rosetta@Home are two of several projects helping find new drugs and understand biological molecules both to understand diseases and find treatments and cures. Versions of these clients are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. In the early days of 2020, Folding@Home, for example, was instrumental in finding SARS-COV-2 weaknesses.
Einstein@Home, officially called the All-sky pulsar search, is searching data gathered at Arecibo for both radio pulsars in binary systems and proof of gravity waves. E@H software uses BOINC and is available for all the BOINC platforms listed above.
FightAIDS@Home is run by The (non-profit) Scripps Research Institute. The project uses the World Community Grid and has software for Android/ARM, MS Windows, Mac OS/X, and Linux/x86.
Mersenne.org is the home for GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. On December 21, 2018, almost exactly one year after the 50th was reported, GIMPS announced that volunteer Patrick Laroche from Ocala, Florida discovered the 51st: 2^82,589,933 - 1, which has 24,862,048 digits. Some years ago, GIMPS volunteers won the Electronic Frontier Foundation's $100,000 award for discovery of the first 10 million digit prime number.
As described on their web site at SETI@Home, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence project went on hiatus (a.k.a "hibernation") last year (2020). If you liked SETI@Home, check out U.C. Berkeley's scienceunited.org. There you'll find other BOINC-based scientific research projects looking for computing help in fields such as astronomy, physics, biomedicine, mathematics, and environmental science, including Universe@Home (astronomy), Cosmology@Home (astronomy), RNA World (molecular biology), and ClimatePrediction.net. Pick the ones that interest you.
For an even more extensive list of other projects, check http://www.distributedcomputing.info/projects.html.

Citizen Science projects

There's lots of real science work that is now progressing a lot faster or able to be a lot more comprehensive because people are volunteering to help collect and/or sort through data for science efforts they care about. Projects can be as simple as taking pictures around your home (e.g., to see what wildlife is around), or helping analyze or compare pictures (which humans can often do much better than computers). If you might be interested, check out:

Zooniverse.org (hundreds of projects, including Galaxy Zoo, Gravity Spy, and Supernova Hunters, and it's not uncommon for major volunteers to be credited on scientific papers that result from the research) (3/2020: no useful non-Javascript content at any of those links), and
SciStarter.com's blog page (I think their blog page is more informative than their main page at SciStarter.org).

Some of these projects use open-source hardware tools from Public Lab that you might find interesting in their own right. For example, Public Lab offers a USB-connected spectroscope for $45 (as of 03/2015) as well as other innovative solutions for otherwise expensive gear.

Volunteer work (U.S.)

www.volunteermatch.org has been named as one of the best Activist sites for matching people willing to volunteer with organizations looking for volunteers. Enter your Zip code and/or interests and get a list of organizations near you.

Challenges that pay

https://www.challenge.gov/: Are you an inventor or problem solver? NASA press release 10-211 described challenge.gov this way:
This new online platform empowers the federal government to bring the best ideas and top talent to bear on the nation's most pressing problems. On this site, entrepreneurs, innovators and citizen solvers can compete for prizes by providing novel solutions to tough problems.
NASA Solve: "Help solve tough problems related to NASA's mission through challenges, prize competitions, and crowdsourcing." (3/2020: non-Javascript content.)

From Groklaw.net on June, 2009: The Case Against Software Patents - Red Hat's EPO-G3/08 Amicus Brief

Many other companies, universities, and organizations around the world have the acronym P.S.R. and/or have an Internet domain name containing the string "psr". None of them have any affiliation with psr.com, which is solely in the U.S. For their domain names (if they have one), please refer to their publications or advertising.