Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"? • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by RachelF » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 7:16 PM UTC

q3k wrote: post #2

A certain (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

Don't forget BSD - all Apple operating systems are based on it.

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

#22

Post by gpm » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 7:19 PM UTC

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".

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

#23

Post by bawolff » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 7:20 PM UTC

RachelF wrote: post #21

q3k wrote: post #2

A certain (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

Don't forget BSD - all Apple operating systems are based on it.

Arguably they aren't the "alternative" so much as a variant of the original thing that got open sourced.

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

#24

Post by arnejenssen » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 7:20 PM UTC

strapi (CMS)

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

#25

Post by cadr » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 7:20 PM UTC

icholy wrote: post #9

ZunarJ5 wrote: post #3

Blender.

Blender didn't start as open source.

True, but it's been open source now a lot longer than it was closed source.

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

#26

Post by tolleydbg » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 7:21 PM UTC

Both WireGuard and OpenVPN

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

#27

Post by dublinben » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 7:22 PM UTC

cURL is ubiquitous. It's unclear whether there is even a proprietary alternative still being sold commercially.

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

#28

Post by entrepy123 » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 7:22 PM UTC

DokuWiki.

This database-free FOSS wiki engine [1] with a focus on simplicity is 19 years old, still gets updated, has useful plugins [2] for additional features, is a great choice for many uses, has adopters that use and love it, and has an estimated 50,000-250,000 installations [3].

As someone wrote, "DokuWiki is and will remain king for many simple reasons" [4].

  [1] https://www.dokuwiki.org
  [2] https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugins
  [3] https://www.dokuwiki.org/faq:installcount
  [4] https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/145l121/what_wiki_do_you_recommend/jnmd2t7/

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

#29

Post by gpm » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 7:23 PM UTC

Qwertious wrote: post #6

q3k wrote: post #2

A certain (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

[flagged]

~45% followed by Windows at ~28% iOS at ~18% and MacOS at ~6% (huge error bars on all those numbers).

But really despite having the plurality of the end user market it's real dominance is in the server market.

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

#30

Post by tomarr » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 7:23 PM UTC

Wordpress is quite a big one?

I think Blogger was the main alternative back then, but there were probably several commercial ones with reasonable market share.