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

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

#51
post #44
post #22

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".

Care to elaborate in what ways Firefox counts as successful? Maybe it had a brief period of success ( maybe ) but that was long ago.

There are many ways to measure success, perhaps the easiest (though not necessarily the best) is money. Mozilla currently has net assets of >$1billion almost entirely earned off of it's back. It was without a doubt been a wildly successful product for the non-profit and to suggest otherwise is ludicrous. Likewise it continues to earn >$0.5billion/year revenue for that non-profit, to suggest that it doesn't continue to be a wildly successful product is ludicrous.

Could it have done even better for itself? Sure. Being the best possible version of yourself isn't necessary to have been successful though.

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

#52
post #22

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".

Atom development has ceased, does that count as successful?

Yes. You don't have to continue to exist forever to be successful, to suggest otherwise would be to amongst other things suggest that no human ever succeeds.

Atom development didn't cease because it failed as a product. It ceased because the company building it was acquired by a company that had already built a (open source) clone to compete with it.

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

#57

Both WireGuard and OpenVPN

Wireguard had no user management (or rather, some kind of identity you can cancel). This is not useable in an entreprise environment without some kind of complicated backend. Something like tailwind.

I live WG though, a magical product.

Same for openVPN, though there are some extending that help.

Compare this with a commercial VPN that will directly plug into your identity system.

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

#60
A "SaaS app" is something rather new. In the old times (early 2000s), you would buy some proprietary server code and get a consultant to install/maintain it for you.

I think vBulletin still operates on this model, although they now offer it as a service too. phpBB is the oldest alternative to vBulletin, there are plenty.

Eventually all these CMSs from the 2000s were cloned and freed in some way or another. Our "SaaS" was cpanel which automagically installed these (they were THIS close to "serverless", if they only knew). By 2010, people barely knew what MovableType was.

cpanel is gone, shared hosting is gone, but that cloned freed CMS tech evolved and still powers a large chunk of the web.

Why doesn't it happen now? I don't know. Maybe it takes time, maybe that was a lucky decade, maybe it's happening in some place I'm not looking at.

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