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Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

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Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

#13

Post by barrrrald »

josephcsible wrote: post #4

Do you mean succeeded as in "has a large user base" or as in "makes a lot of money"?

Either! Basically any measure an objective observer could look at and be like, "oh yes this is a breakout hit with a bright future ahead of it"

Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

#16

Post by krisoft »

Qwertious wrote: post #6
q3k wrote: post #2

A certain (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

[flagged]

Being successful and being “the main anything” is not the same though.

Linux as an operating system is very succesfull. Used by all the time on a ton of servers powering a lot of important things. It is also not the main desktop OS. Both of these statements can be, and are, true.

Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

#18

Post by drewmcarthur »

jjmarr wrote: post #14

gcc comes to mind. Remember when every computer came with its own C compiler? LaTeX also killed proprietary mathematics typesetting.

this is what i’m thinking. HTTP itself only overtook Gopher when it was released into the public domain, to compete with Gopher’s proprietary licensing.

Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

#19

Post by willsmith72 »

barrrrald wrote: post #10
tommoor wrote: post #5

GitLab, Mattermost, RocketChat would be a few good examples of products that began as OSS alternatives to well-established players. Outline ( https://www.getoutline.com ) is successful on most metrics you'd judge a business and OSS project on. I'm not sure if any of these ever pitched themselves explicitly that way on HN though. I think explicitly labeling as an "Open source alternative" brings a lot of baggage and e…

GitLab is a really interesting example, but I don't know if it'd have positioned itself as an "open source alternative" As for Mattermost, RocketChat, and Outline – I think these are great examples of projects positioned this way that haven't broken out. They all seem great, but it's not clear that being an "open source alternative" to Slack really worked for Mattermost...

i know of some gigantic companies using self-hosted mattermost for data privacy reasons. perhaps they have less marketing incentive, but i would certainly call that a success
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