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Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

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Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#171
post #155
post #117

There 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.

Godot might be it in the future... but not yet.

It seems to focus on 2D for now, almost all the showcase games for it are 2D also. I don't think it's been battletested enough in 3D yet.

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#172
post #117

There 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…

https://godotengine.org/

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#173
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because they're buying growth. Their last quarter revenue was almost $4 billion, you can definitely serve millions of daily rides for way less than that. My point is that you could have an open source version of these services that could be managed by local governments or not for profits.

> That's because they're buying growth. That is the idea I guess. > Their last quarter revenue was almost $4 billion, you can definitely serve millions of daily rides for way less than that. How do you calculate this? Sure if you were just you with car, you could - but not sure this is exactly a workable business model without uber - if it was then people would presumably not use uber. > My point is that you could ha…

> How do you calculate this? Sure if you were just you with car, you could - but not sure this is exactly a workable business model without uber - if it was then people would presumably not use uber.

I'm not a 100% sure if I understand your question. What I meant was that you could run a marketplace web service like uber or airbnb for way less than they're spending now. The variable costs of processing those transactions approach 0 at scale, also would be practically free if someone wanted to host it themselves for their small town.

> You could have open source versions - but the source code is a small part of the operation - and I'm not sure why I would want to government to run it - or why people should not be allowed to profit from it. If the issue is that workers are being exploiter maybe a better option is to see if there is some reasonable regulation to be put in place or why there is such low demand relative to the supply of labour.

Yeah I agree. The OP asked about a good open source alternative and I think that this could work as an open source project and be deployed per town (or as a decentralized application).

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#174
It's harder to names ones that do, really. It's easy to find some "alternative" to most famous software packets, but despite people repeatedly naming all the same programs (known to pretty much anyone interested anyways), none of them can replace, say, photoshop.

So, out of my head (and, yeah, all of them have "alternatives" no serious user would ever switch to):

Ableton Live

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Premiere

AutoCAD

Microsoft Office (Excel in particular)

Google Calendar (self-hosted)

VisualStudio of Jetbrains IDEs

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#175
post #7

Excel alternatives might be uncountable. Implementing spreadsheet basics is an advanced beginner exercise. But even Google’s billions only get it a distant second best because Microsoft is still working hard despite the lead. Sure Google and Apple can meet most needs most of the time. They’re good enough mainly because they are free beer. Not because they are open source. Obviously. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a GNU fanb…

Honestly the suite of Excel + Powerpoint is incredibly hard to replace.

The entry level to power user path of Powerpoint and Excel specifically make it easy to jump in and then get very powerful usage from very quickly.

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#176
post #174

It's harder to names ones that do, really. It's easy to find some "alternative" to most famous software packets, but despite people repeatedly naming all the same programs (known to pretty much anyone interested anyways), none of them can replace, say, photoshop. So, out of my head (and, yeah, all of them have "alternatives" no serious user would ever switch to): Ableton Live Adobe Photoshop Adobe Premiere AutoCAD Mi…

> Jetbrains IDEs

The Community Edition of IntelliJ, at least, from which all the others derive (I believe) is open source.

https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#177
post #117

There 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…

Earlier this year I discovered Xenko [1]. I didn't test it personally, but I was quite impressed with the features provided, and the game editor looks like a mix between Unity and Unreal Engine. The 3D engine seems a little bit better than Godot, from what I've seen. Though there is no support for Linux/MacOS yet, and mobile is done through Xamarin, that may come with its own ball of bugs.

[1] http://xenko.com/

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#178
post #87

There's tons of highly specialized vertical market software that will basically never have open-source alternatives. Every industry has a few examples. I at least know of the high-end CAD, FEA, and CFD software used in certain branches of engineering. See Ansys, Autodesk, etc. The reason why is that building this type of software correctly requires an immense amount of domain knowledge. That type of knowledge doesn't…

I don't understand why there isn't an industrial consortium supporting an open source CAD standard. Enough companies depend on proprietary software that they already pay a fortune for that they could front the cost of software development to save money in the long run.

(1) Cost of software is relatively small compared with the cost of employing the people who use it.

(2) Cost of software is relatively small compared with the cost of retraining staff and changing business workflows and processes to cope with different software.

(3) Changing to new software is relatively simple compared with the problems of making all your staff, your contractors and your suppliers change to new software.

(4) Even if changing to new software was relatively simple and cheap, there would be massive risks in doing it. If you are designing nuclear power stations, nuclear submarines, skyscrapers, bridges or whatever, the cost of mistakes can run into the billions, or be fatal for a significant number of people.

(5) Bonus point: making this kind of switch could take a decade and could end up not saving you any money (cf Munich trying to switch to open source). Not many CEOs will attempt it because they are more focused on the next quarter's results. Anyway, in many if not most companies, the benefits -- if any -- would accrue to whoever the-next-CEO-after-the-next-CEO happens to be. And who really cares about that?

It's hard enough to get most people to change their email client or their text editor or whatever when the alternatives are free and the real-world risks are negligible. Getting them to change the software on which their whole business survival is based is another matter.

Moral: changing business software is not as simple as it seems if you only look at the software and don't look at the whole business plus the whole industry infrastructure of related businesses. It's never as simple as people think.

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#179

Video editing. There’s Kdenlive and OpenShot that are maybe the most well-established, but they we’re both very buggy the last time I dealt with them, and they’re nowhere near featureful as what’s available commercially. I think we could benefit from a well-know MovieMaker equivalent. Something that isn’t featureful, but is reliable (read: doesn’t crash) and intuitive.

I've heard several video pros swear by Blender that it works wonders as a video editor, but I don't have experience in that area.

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Merge conflicts are definitely not the same thing as file locking. At the point where you're getting a merge conflict, it's too late. How are you going to resolve conflicts in an audio file? File locking is a way to communicate in advance that nobody should attempt to make changes to a particular file until the lock is cleared. Merge conflicts are communication in arrears (so to speak) and at that point, effort has a…

> How are you going to resolve conflicts in an audio file? By choosing one and discarding the other, or by creating a new audio file that incorporates both changes, just like one would do for any other file. While I don't know if this exists, there's nothing theoretically preventing the creation of a diffing/patching tool for audio/video files, detecting insertions/deletions/replacements (perhaps by timestamp/frame r…

A lock prevents you from opening it to edit in the first place, without warnings that "so and so user is currently editing this, are you sure you want to open this as read-only?". This reduces accidental time waste (and computer systems shouldn't try to protect people from deliberately wasting their own time, because they probably aren't).
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