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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?

#191

Post by neltnerb »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #10
brudgers wrote: 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…

I'm not an Excel user. Genuinely curious: Is it really that the alternatives are worse, lacking features, unstable, or does it come down to "they're not Excel", in that they're not a drop in replacement that can perfectly load and run every Excel sheet ever created. Because that would be my gut feeling: Not interoperable enough, since some things just work differently, but not necessarily much worse. If you can't sen…

Excel gives you the power of being a programmer without having to admit that you're programming. There are people who do absurdly impressive things with it, the CA-GREET model for estimating CO2 outputs is an excel workbook that took me a while to figure out how to even use.

But the barrier to someone using it is much less because it is gentler than, say, giving someone python code to do the estimate and expecting them to do it correctly. I think the interface familiarity is key.

Unfortunately, while LibreOffice is usually pretty good at all this, it's always just one or two peculiar difference in function calls that breaks it. It's pretty close, but just not interoperable for anything advanced.

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

#192

Post by dragonwriter »

neeeeees wrote: post #18
iforgotpassword wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an Excel user. Genuinely curious: Is it really that the alternatives are worse, lacking features, unstable, or does it come down to "they're not Excel", in that they're not a drop in replacement that can perfectly load and run every Excel sheet ever created. Because that would be my gut feeling: Not interoperable enough, since some things just work differently, but not necessarily much worse. If you can't sen…

A PM that worked on Excel in the late 2000s explained it to me like this: Most people use about 20% of the features in Excel - which should make it easy for competitors to copy, right? The kicker is that different people/industries tend to use a “different 20%” of the features, making the barrier to really compete very high.

> The kicker is that different people/industries tend to use a “different 20%” of the features, making the barrier to really compete very high.

The thing is that different job functions that are exposed to overlapping user bases in the same industry (and even office) use a different 20%. If it was just per-industry variation, it would be easy for industry-specific competitors to succeed, but the parts of Excel used actively by Andrew, who makes a tool that is also consumed by Bob and Carol are different than those used actively by Bob and Carol (which also differ from each other, and which each have their own users who rely on the tool and the features it relies on, even though they don't actively use the features.)

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

#193

Post by mNovak »

sansnomme wrote: post #84

High level multiphysics, RF, and CAD tools and simulators. Autodesk, Ansys etc. still dominate the field. The state of tools like OpenFoam is like the early days of Gimp and KiCad; theoretically possible to use but only if your background is in software engineering and/or if you are really, really poor and desperate e.g. a grad student on a tight budget. If you look at software like open source FTDT sims, almost all…

100% this. When I startup-ed, I looked hard for a free alternative for RF simulation. There's some FDTD solvers, but as mentioned, they require you to spec the mesh, which is laborious and black magic which Ansys HFSS simply does for you.

Only saving grace is that these companies usually have some "start-up" discount (~95% discount), which of course I anticipate feeds the lack of open source development.

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

#194

Post by sgent »

gitgud wrote: post #36
yellowapple wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, OpenOffice (and by descent LibreOffice) did copy MS Office's UI/UX. Then Microsoft switched to the "Ribbon" interface, throwing all that shared knowledge out the window. Recreating the Ribbon in LibreOffice is an active development task, last I checked.

Is there any limitations on how much they can copy? Surely Microsoft have some of the design and specs locked down with patents

This really depends on the Google v Oracle lawsuit currently. If Oracle wins then the remains of VisCalc will have a copyright claim against everyone...

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

#195

Post by neltnerb »

Strom wrote: post #56
LinuxBender wrote: post #5

There are some projects that have solutions, but not great ones. My definition of great is something that people with very little technical knowledge can set up themselves, correctly and securely. This is based on my experience, trying to show non technical people how to self host some things. - File, email self hosted and e2e encryption has Nextcloud, but only technical people can set it up. There should be a happy-…

> There should be a happy-clicky thing that non technical people could set up and it would force them to do it the right way, because the right way is the easy way. Absolutely! There should be a default configuration path that is easily accessible. That is to say, the non technical user can basically just click Install and answer maybe one question and everything else is automatic with good defaults. Any additional c…

Maybe just ask how big they want their mailbox to be with estimated monthly costs at each size? That will match up to the experience of buying things on the internet. Give a way to increase the size later and make clear they can do it and it should feel like a pretty safe question to ask.

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

#196

Post by TACIXAT »

jimbob45 wrote: post #111

The IDA disassembler is pretty irreplaceable. Or at least it was until the NSA released Ghidra - I haven't tried it to know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Disassembler

I feel Binary Ninja (closed source) is kicking both their asses in terms of UI and API. Ghidra feels really dated to me. IDA is incredibly expensive. Another open source alternative would be radare.

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

#197

Post by krick »

trynewideas wrote: post #186
krick wrote: 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…

Re: Photoshop in particular, the better question might be "What alternatives are there to Photoshop _for a specific task or workflow_?" Photoshop does 3D modeling, animation, photo retouching, RAW processing, prepress, vector drawing, typography, and automation _before_ adding functionality that exists only in PS-compatible plugins. The component tasks all have alternatives, but nothing does all of those things in a…

It's useless verbalism. Like in that koan, where a bunch of monks were asked to describe a jug, you can use all the words in attempt to describe what Photoshop does, but the point is, if you use Photoshop for the tasks most of professional users use it — which is retouching/design, because despite many people indeed use it for drawing, if you would talk about drawing you'd compare things to SAI/Kita instead — you most likely can not replace Photoshop by anything else without losing productivity. Why you cannot exactly do that would be a little different for every user, and that's pretty much the point — there is a thousand different things it can do, and most of them are crucial to some people, but useless to others. And something like Gimp having all of them but one crucial thing just doesn't cut it — you simply won't switch, despite it costing you significant amount of money. Because either you can work, or you cannot. And verbally specifying why is almost as much of work for Photoshop developers, as actually implementing it in code is.

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

#198

Post by yellowapple »

joshuamorton wrote: post #181
yellowapple wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't quite think you understand how perforce works. Locking the file is a signal not to work on it because someone else is modifying it. There isn't currently software that supports semantic merging of audio or video, so perforce says "someone is recoloring the asset, don't change the animation until they're done, or you'll just have to do the work again". In the meantime, perforce prevents you from checking the f…

> Locking the file is a signal not to work on it because someone else is modifying it

I know how file locking works. Like I've said before, my day job involves using a locking-based version control system. My disdain for locking-based version control comes specifically from having to put up with it instead of using something sane like Git.

> So you have to explicitly and clearly bypass your source control to do what you suggest, at which point someone rightfully yells at you.

And yet that will inevitably happen anyway, because someone's breathing down your neck to get that animation done and won't take "well I'm waiting for Bob to finish recoloring first" as an answer. Cue the aforementioned fistfight over whether Alice's animation or Bob's recoloring can happen first.

Or it'll inevitably happen due to the aforementioned risk of deadlock (Alice is tweaking animations in a different order than Bob is tweaking textures, and thus run into a situation where both are waiting on the other to release locks on files; cue fistfight).

I've seen both cases happen repeatedly. All of those cases would've been avoided had we used a version control system that used branches and merges instead of locks and unlocks.

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

#200

Post by trynewideas »

Mizza wrote: post #95
safwan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your article is really interesting! I did not know about Aspera before reading it. I did not have any idea that changing protocol will have this amount of benefit in data transmission. Also amused that no one have not solved it in Open Source world.

The worst part is that Aspera is actually a proprietary fork of a Free Software project that IBM purchased and then strong-armed institutions into using until it became an industry standard.

FASP, specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_and_Secure_Protocol
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