VLC
It's already a FOSS software : https://www.videolan.org/vlc
Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
211–220 of 283 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Microsoft successfully sued Corel for design patent infringement related to the ribbon interface. Corel had a “Word mode” in WordPerfect X7. The damages were about a quarter million dollars. YMMV.
Oracle v Google is copyright as applied to API’s. Different laws. Patents expire more quickly.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
Well no, the failure modes would be different, but all of those things would still cause problems with branching and merging, mostly because you can't actually merge binary artifacts, only rebase.
And in a world where you can only rebase, locking actually makes sense.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#214Open-source data storage is full of gaps compared to its commercial/bespoke brethren. To give just one example, consider multi-tenancy/QoS. Very few OSS distributed filesystems or object stores even seem to have heard of the concept, and those few barely scratch the surface.
Can you give a better example of what you mean? There are plenty of multi-tenancy file systems. Do you mean QoS by user or over the network?
> There are plenty of multi-tenancy file systems
Name one. What I mean by multi-tenant is that the namespace, security space, capacity quota and I/O quota are fully isolated and managed at the storage-system API, not via other facilities such as cgroups which aren't even applicable beyond a single-host level. Each tenant gets something that looks like a private service with predictable limits (appropriate for an SLA) regardless of what other tenants are doing, despite being on shared infrastructure. Commercial vendors like NetApp and all the "hyperconverged" crowd have support for this kind of isolation at the cluster level, as do some bespoke storage systems such as the one I work on at Facebook, but in the open-source world? Nada.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#215Focus on what you know. Make sure your team includes at the very least (in no particular order):
- Someone who is part of the target audience. They should be able to provide your team with a good idea of the features you absolutely need to get started, and might be a good source of ideas for differentiating features.
- Someone great at manual quality assurance - user testing, poking the system through the laughably complex and diverse devices we all use, and ideally translating manual test scripts to automated ones, where possible. Lots of software has massive amounts of features hidden behind a broken UI.
- Someone great at UX, in particular related to the type of UI you are building. Web UX is not the same as desktop or API UX.
- Someone great at automated quality assurance - TDD, CI/CD, linting, fuzzing, code & user metrics, telemetry, performance and stress testing. They keep your progress from stalling over time.
- Someone trusted by the entire team to plan, direct and arbitrate. They avoid double work, keep the team going in the same direction, and keep interactions human rather than textual (which has far too low bandwidth to avoid conflict in the long term).
For most features you'll want all of these involved in the planning at the same time (and place, if at all possible), to get the most out of everyone's time. They'll all be able to see how the work fits together and will provide unforeseen insights and questions crucial to building an excellent product.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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. Well no, the failure modes would be different, but all of those things would still cause problems with branching and merging, mostly because you can't actually merge binary artifacts, only rebase. And in a world where you can only rebase, l…
> all of those things would still cause problems with branching and merging
The deadlock most certainly would not. One would get rebased on top of the other, in the worst case.
(In the best case, Alice and Bob would both be committing/pushing to their respective branches early and often, and could therefore look at each others' branches and see what changed between them; if you really want to emulate locking, you could do so pretty straightforwardly by checking if there are any changes to that file in commits outside of your own branch's commit history, and it should be doable to write automated tooling to that effect. All the "benefits" of locking without getting in the way of anything.)
> And in a world where you can only rebase, locking actually makes sense.
Even in a world where you can only rebase, locking is far more of a hindrance than a benefit, for the reasons already outlined.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#217Video 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 tried everything that I can find and in the end I decided that my best bet was Blender. It's the only thing which is reasonably bug free and has a UX that allows you to get work done at a reasonable speed. I would say that even without considering bugs, the biggest problem with the free/open source video editors out there is that the work flow is truly awful for doing repetitive actions. I think the pull to be "easy for beginners" is just too strong. The applications turn into a frustrating exercise in precision mouse clicking. Blender's UX is actually awesome... but intuitive it is not, unfortunately. I think it too me 2 days just to configure it before I got started LOL.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#218Google Cloud Messenger/Firebase.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we're gonna have to agree to disagree on that. I've found that locking a file from any changes entirely almost always causes more problems than it ostensibly solves, and is a massive impediment to productivity on any team larger than a single person. The vast majority of the time it's entirely unnecessary anyway.
Yes, but you probably don't make a habit of storing music or video (or weird proprietary binary animation formats) that people are modifying in git.
Indeed I do not. If game developers (and/or game engine developers; looking at you, Unity3D...) showed similar restraint, then they likely wouldn't feel the need to tie themselves to 90's-esque version control schemes.
Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?
#220Peter Navarro Mayor of LA 2022. He will stop LAPD Crimebuster Vigilante Anti-Homeless Violence and end Cal AG Becerra Corruption