VLC comes to mind. It's been years since I last saw anyone using any other media player.
Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
101–110 of 163 posts
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#102So much, I know a lot of these have already been said so forgive me if I repeat some that others have said,
- 80-90% of the web's servers (something like nginx 35%, Apache 30%, cloudflare 20% who I believe run Linux for a large chunk of their infrastructure, litespeed 10%)
- stock market. I've read a number of articles discussing how NYSE, Tokyo, and NASDAQ run their trades and servers on Linux.
- internet infrastructure: From Linux to ssl to VPN sooooo much of internet's infrastructure is open source. From the servers to the protocols to the stacks. I don't have hard numbers but I'd be comfortable guessing at least 3/4 of the net's infra is open source.
- Git
- Firefox
- Wikipedia
- Home Assistant
- OBS
- Linux
- VLC
- DaVinci Resolve is rising soooo fast for video editing, and for good reason. Once you move out of the consumer/hobbyist tier or beyond Premiere and more into pro-tier hardware Resolve is fucking incredible. It will be a couple of years before it displaces Avid's strangle hold on the film industry, but it's going to happen.
- Blender
encoders, while you may not notice it, a ton of the media we consume is coded with open source, from:
- AV1 of Netflix/Amazon/Youtube fame
- VP9
- x264
- x265
- Apple Lossless, etc...
- ffmpeg
- Android is built off AOSP.
- Wordpress
And obviously I'm missing thousands of used-in-production very "succesful" projects.
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#103GitLab is definitely the most obvious success at $600M+ in revenue, but a couple new ones are Cal.com and PostHog. Cal.com is open-source Calendly, has raised $32M, and shares their stats publicly: https://cal.com/open PostHog is open-source Mixpanel/Amplitude, has raised $39M, and appears to be widely recommended these days.
What about git? Wasn’t git developed exactly as an alternative to a commercial product? Git is probably the most successful open source alternative software, so much that it completely obliterated the competition.
Yes, Linus Torvalds developed git because the Linux kernel at the time used Bitkeeper, a proprietary source control system and its owner was changing the license. Now, everyone and their goldfish uses git, and I haven't heard about Bitkeeper in many years.
It hasn't completely obliterated all the competition, but most of it, and those that aren't dead are on life support: in the open-source domain, CVS is mostly dead, SVN isn't far behind, and Mercurial is barely hanging on. In the proprietary domain, it seems only stodgy long-time enterprise customers still use Perforce and ClearCase, and MS's SourceSafe seems to be dead (and MS even bought GitHub).
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#104Inkscape, Audacity, and ffmpeg. I know professional designers don't like Inkscape for UI and path limitations but I have gotten used to it and can use it effectively.
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#105Blender, ffmpeg, pdf24
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#106With how anti-consumer the recent Plex moves have been, Jellyfin [1] has gotten really popular among self-hosting community. It is arguably the best alternative to Plex in terms of features and the amount of freedom given to the user. [1] https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin
Plex really does have a lot going for it with the really nice Apps -- Plexamp works especially well with large music libraries. I hadn't used Jellyfin in some time, but I went to set it up last week, and it's still not as simple as Plex is. Really wish the Jellyfin folks would put together a docker compose setup that run nginx and lets encrypt for example.
> Really wish the Jellyfin folks would put together a docker compose setup that run nginx and lets encrypt for example.
I don't know what they include but there are official docker images.
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#107Canvas is an open-source learning management system used at universities: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms
Surprising! This feels exactly like finding out Overleaf is open-source a few days back [0].
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#108GitLab, 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 open core, not open source. They're very clear about that: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2016/07/20/gitlab-is-open-core...
Ok, cool.
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#109Blender, ffmpeg, pdf24
pdf24 does not appear to be open-source, just free (as in beer). Were you thinking of PDFtk?
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#110So much, I know a lot of these have already been said so forgive me if I repeat some that others have said, - 80-90% of the web's servers (something like nginx 35%, Apache 30%, cloudflare 20% who I believe run Linux for a large chunk of their infrastructure, litespeed 10%) - stock market. I've read a number of articles discussing how NYSE, Tokyo, and NASDAQ run their trades and servers on Linux. - internet infrastruc…
DaVinci Resolve is great (I'm partial to all Adobe replacements; Resolve is indeed a great alternative to Premiere, and Pixelmator, Rebelle, Affinity, etc. are great replacements for Photoshop), but none of these are OSS.