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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"?

#131

Post by commercialnix »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #57
tolleydbg wrote: post #26

Both WireGuard and OpenVPN

Wireguard had no user management (or rather, some kind of identity you can cancel). This is not useable in an entreprise environment without some kind of complicated backend. Something like tailwind. I live WG though, a magical product. Same for openVPN, though there are some extending that help. Compare this with a commercial VPN that will directly plug into your identity system.

Wireguard layer-3 tunneling identity (public key) is for machines, not human users. Rolling out Wireguard in an "enterprise environment" for over 600 user laptops and desktops (mix of Linux and some macOS* and Windows*) with our existing configuration management (SaltStack/GitOps) was extremely easy to do.

Where additional layer-3 tunnels that were user or group specific were necessary, we did some very light scripting that any sophomore-level Sys Admin can handle.

We already have BeyondCorp / ZeroTrust for any layer-4 and above authentication.

>> Compare this with a commercial VPN that will directly plug into your identity system.

This would be something out of the clicky-clicky industrial complex.

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

#133

Post by commercialnix »

Reports from large bodies of users is they are very happy with https://OnlyOffice.com which some clients are on to avoid GSuite to avoid sharing their business data with a faceless and highly ideologically partisan third party (Google).

Thus far the only cases where the MS Office users don't gradually slide into the gravity of an OnlyOffice service on private silicon is the heavy MS Excel (desktop) users who are of a very relevant (CFO, accounting) yet relatively small cohort.

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

#134

Post by commercialnix »

haunter wrote: post #61

Early days torrent scene ran on proprietary adware clients like BitTorrent itself, µTorrent, and BitComet but nowadays open source clients are more popular and recommended by most trackers. I'm on a pretty big private tracker and almost everyone (+95%) is using qBittorrent, Transmission, or rTorrent. Though Vuze was also one of the earliest clients and it's also open source for some reasons it never really became pop…

I used Azureus, before it was renamed Vuze, in early 2003. All my friends had Azureus too, maybe because Macintoshes were what most of our parents (and thus we) had at the time. Azureus was what we all knew.

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

#135

Post by commercialnix »

We should also note, that all modern SaaS is running on mostly open source databases, open source languages, open source middleware, and the PaaS and IaaS they are running on are all powered by open source too.

This is not to disregard the meaningful thought and work that goes into the proprietary layers built on top of the open source codebases. But, we should all acknowledge that without those extremely high quality open source codebases, most SaaS wouldn't exist in the first place.

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

#136

Post by dredmorbius »

I could list out a bunch of examples (and deleted my first draft of this comment listing various examples: Wikipedia, operating systems, Web browsers, software languages, databases, and a host of desktop and mobile apps generally).

But I think the more interesting perspective is to reverse the question: where are proprietary software specifically successful?

Many years ago I'd noted that the concept of a shrinkwrap-based software company had very few successful exemplars. Microsoft and, perhaps Adobe, being the best-known cases. Through the mid-aughts, most other "software" firms had tremendous consulting arms: IBM, Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP, Symantec, Informix, and the Big-N consulting companies notably.

Since the mid-aughts, SAAS and social media companies have arisen, though that's still a segment where a very small number of companies come to claim a monopoly position, largely due to adtech dynamics (on both ad sales aggregation and surveillance data).

Actual shrinkwrap software markets are increasingly marginal, fighting for table scraps, with the remaining large participants (Microsoft, Adobe) increasingly headed to subscription and/or ad-supported business models.

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

#137

Post by asadotzler »

adastra22 wrote: post #45
gpm wrote: post #22

Examples I haven't seen mentioned yet: Firefox. Atom/VSCode (Sublime Text clones). Android (iOS clone). Various databases (postgres, mongodb, etc). Reddit (Digg alternative, since closed source) though I'm not sure releasing their source code had anything to do with their success. HashiCorp in general sort of counts though it's harder to say "it was competing against X".

Firefox is open sourced Netscape Navigator 5.0.

No, it's not. We tossed that code 6 months after the open sourcing and started fresh to build the Communicator clone which we then tossed aside for the entirely new Firefox. Firefox is not Navigator 5. That's plain inaccurate.

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

#138

Post by mrcsharp »

rascul wrote: post #118
ray_v wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair point -- a reverse proxy setup may be outside the scope of the jellyfin project, but as others have pointed out they also provide an official docker image with a docker compose and other container management solutions. It just seems like a logical next step would be to outline instructions for a more secure setup using something "standard" like nginx instead of leaving it as an exercise to the user -- w…

> It just seems like a logical next step would be to outline instructions for a more secure setup using something "standard" like nginx instead of leaving it as an exercise to the user -- who may not be so tech savvy. Maybe this is what you're looking for: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/networking/ Edit: On desktop, the sidebar is visible which includes links to instructions for Nginx, Caddy, Let's Encrypt, and so…

Oh this is very nice! I don't think they had these docs when I first set up Jellyfin years ago.

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

#139

Post by antifa »

chx wrote: post #44
gpm wrote: post #22

Examples I haven't seen mentioned yet: Firefox. Atom/VSCode (Sublime Text clones). Android (iOS clone). Various databases (postgres, mongodb, etc). Reddit (Digg alternative, since closed source) though I'm not sure releasing their source code had anything to do with their success. HashiCorp in general sort of counts though it's harder to say "it was competing against X".

Care to elaborate in what ways Firefox counts as successful? Maybe it had a brief period of success ( maybe ) but that was long ago.

Do you live in a world where success means "#1" and failure means "not #1"?

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

#140

Post by r3db34rd »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #122
Yawrehto wrote: post #76

Wait, has no one mentioned LibreOffice yet? 200 million active users (!) seems like it's successful enough. Admittedly, it hasn't really challenged Microsoft Office yet, but it's growing, and also it's hard to look at something with 200 million active users and say 'that's a failure'. Definitely an alternative though. There's also uBlock Origin, but I don't know if it's the largest adblocker yet. It should be, though…

Opening LibreCalc just once was enough to prove to me that it's not a viable alternative to Office. Both usability and performance were bad, performance egregiously so.

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