Microsoft Office because as soon as OpenOffice succeeded in supporting the formats Microsoft updated to pptx, docx, etc. because they know it’s one of the few things keeping people stuck with Windows machines for business.
Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
151–160 of 283 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#152airtable
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open source projects tend to emerge when there is general access to the purpose of that project. You can't expect an open source project for Ocean-based Wind Turbine simulation or molecular synthesis of Organochloride compounds. They're niche industries that require tremendous amount of upfront investment, in both physical assets to realize the utility of the open-source project, and knowledge-base required to operat…
I actually respectfully disagree with this. In my travels, I have encountered many situations where very niche, industry-specific software is completely Free and Open Source, and I have encountered situations where commonly-used, widely useful software is proprietary with no Free solution. On the Free side, I think one reason is the copyleft nature of the GPL. Another pattern indicator is how modular the software is…
Were these open-source projects result of academic research or someone's dissertation? If so, then yes, many niche packages, for e.g. from CERN are open source even though no one has the ability to go and build their own particle accelerator.
Another exception is public works paid by taxes such as Government open source projects.
And yet, in commercial industry where I've worked - it is hard to find anything that's useful and can replace internal software because there are no free alternatives. I don't expect these things to be out and open!
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#154There might be an opening for an OSS alternative to game engines like Unity and Unreal. There are scores of open-source game frameworks out there, but there's nothing I'm aware of that comes close to the ease-of-use and cross-platform-build support that Unity has. Of course, you might have an uphill battle because both of the above are free for smaller projects and have fairly generous pricing models that scale based…
What about Godot?
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#155There might be an opening for an OSS alternative to game engines like Unity and Unreal. There are scores of open-source game frameworks out there, but there's nothing I'm aware of that comes close to the ease-of-use and cross-platform-build support that Unity has. Of course, you might have an uphill battle because both of the above are free for smaller projects and have fairly generous pricing models that scale based…
Godot is what you are talking about. It seems to be doing very well. It's MIT licensed, and has official support for C#, C++ and their own Lua-like scripting language.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#156FPGA tools, with few exceptions (IceStorm, SymbiFlow)
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#157There might be an opening for an OSS alternative to game engines like Unity and Unreal. There are scores of open-source game frameworks out there, but there's nothing I'm aware of that comes close to the ease-of-use and cross-platform-build support that Unity has. Of course, you might have an uphill battle because both of the above are free for smaller projects and have fairly generous pricing models that scale based…
Superpowers [1] tried to fill this niche though I don't know how successful it was.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#158This article about how Microsoft Access won't die got me thinking about creating an open source alternative. I just retired and am looking for a project. I also have a history with msft that might be helpful. https://medium.com/young-coder/microsoft-access-the-zombie-d...
There is a LGPL library that I am familiar with that handles it https://jackcess.sourceforge.io
I have a very bare bones Android app which uses the library https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.unwrappeda...
Incidentally my Android app is based off my free software Android project https://github.com/dennis-sheil/android-spreadsheet
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#159GUI clients for SVN. There are plenty for git, but when I started working at an SVN company I had no luck finding a free one. Ended up paying for SmartSVN, which is okay but still not as good as even some of the OSS git clients.
Have you tried TortoiseSVN? A lot of IDE's have an SVN interface - Appcode, IntelliJ, Xcode, Delphi etc
I'm not sure how similar it is, but TortoiseHg is the best version control GUI I've used
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the goals of the FreeCAD project [1] is to be a high-level interface for tools like OpenFOAM (via the CfdOF workbench [2]), and other solvers/meshers like CalculiX, Elmer, Gmsh, and Netgen. Its modular, workbench-based, Python-around-C++ core approach provides an environment for people to make their own specialized tools, like the Arch Rebar tool [3] that was created as part of a Google Summer of Code project.…
I recently spent time at work trying to get OpenFOAM to do, well, anything using FreeCAD. I couldn't get it to install properly on linux or windows. On windows, you're supposed to use some part of their autoinstaller through the freecad UI, which apparently didn't set some environment variable somewhere. On linux, I had package incompatibilities (using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS). It... needs work.
> It... needs work.
Hah, very true. I have been working directly with OpenFOAM upstream to improve the packaging situation on Debian/Ubuntu but unfortunately I didn't get started in time for the 18.04 release. It's a bit tricky too in that many FreeCAD developers use Linux but I would bet most of our potential engineering end-users would be on Windows. Thanks for your feedback.