R or the Python Scientific stack over SAS or SPSS.
Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
41–50 of 163 posts
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#42A 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.
BSD stands for Berkeley Software* Distribution (of UNIX). It is a direct descent of UNIX itself, not an open source clone.
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#43Pretty much anything on the CNCF landscape. Tradeoffs are generally the same as always: trading control and effort for time and money. If you cannot make that tradeoff (i.e. because you cannot handle the control and effort or because you don't have the time or money) the choice is made for you.
Of course there can be a USP and quality aspect, take basic resource metrics for example, you can pay someone to do that for you, or you can do it yourself, the difference in effort is marginal but the difference in cost can be extreme. But there are cases where that marginal difference in effort is what tips the choice towards paying someone else to do it. In my experience, if you cannot make such efforts, or don't have a plan to make such efforts in the future, you're either in the wrong business or are doomed to fail purely on PnL.
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#44Examples 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".
Care to elaborate in what ways Firefox counts as successful? Maybe it had a brief period of success (maybe) but that was long ago.
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#45Examples 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".
Firefox is open sourced Netscape Navigator 5.0.
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#46I'll narrow the scope to "OSS software that is common and where its license is not a selling point to most of its users." KHTML/Chromium/WebKit (to Internet Explorer), Firefox, MySQL, BSD (to AT&T Unix), GCC, LLVM, GIMP, InkScape, VLC to name a few.
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#47Examples 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".
Atom development has ceased, does that count as successful?
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#48I like Bitwarden [0]. Backend in .NET.
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blender didn't start as open source.
True, but it's been open source now a lot longer than it was closed source.
I would also say that it was never even close to reasonable competition to commercial alternatives until it open sourced, and it was a while after that before it started to catch up. I still remember some of the artists at Gearbox laughing when I brought Blender up in the late 2000s when I was a teenager touring the studio.
Re: Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
#50Examples 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".
Atom development has ceased, does that count as successful?
All will cease at some point but we shouldn't wait too long just to be pragmatic judging success.