[deleted]
Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
531–540 of 837 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#532Both of the ones that spring immediately to mind have reservations.
Interix, the second POSIX subsystem for Windows NT, already had all of the things that the Windows Subsystem for Linux is gradually reinventing, and Microsoft already owns it.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17773681
Some of the softwares involved were in fact open-source. Unfortunately, the SUA Community disappeared years ago, and there is no trace of the software packages that it used to provide.
I haven't kept up to date with Blue Lion (ArcaOS) and eComstation; so it is tricky to nominate OS/2.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#533Windows Phone. To this day no Android phone I've used ever as fast, reliable or plain refined as WP8 was. Unique design and many genuinely useful features, and it reflected a time when smartphones could have been vibrant and diverse, not our current two mega-platforms or nothing.
Why doesn't Microsoft just open-source the windows phone OS as an android alternative ?
A lot of the Windows Phone OS is ported from the Windows code at the time (networking stack, libraries, UI) with fixes for multiple architectures (ARM/MIPS), power, and performance.
Source: I worked on it.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#534Acta, an "outliner", which means a hierarchical text editor: http://a-sharp.com/acta/ I ended up writing most of my school essays in it. You could start with a high-level outline and recursively flesh it out until you had a complete document. The tree structure made it really easy to reorder sections at any scale. There is a successor called Opal - the last version of Acta was in 1993, and the last version of Opal wa…
org-mode
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really hope Purism's Librem5 pans out for this very reason. A third alternative. I don't want Windows Phone, since that would not buy me much more privacy than Android with today's Microsoft, so having an open 3rd party mobile platform would be the solution here, I think.
There's SailfishOS, which is an alternative to Android and iPhone. It's a mobile Linux OS with an optional support for Android apps. It's not the world's most advanced mobile OS, but a good way to escape the Apple and Google ecosystems. It is possible to purchase the OS and install it to Sony Xperia phones. https://shop.jolla.com
I guess it’s not even available for viewing in my country (the United States). Coincidentally, this must be close to what it’s like in the UK (just on a much much smaller scale) after the GDPR stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#536CircuitMaker 2000
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#537I’ve been a heavy user of FoxPro [1] back in time. I would really love someone to make a better version of it. Although these days you have Airtable [2] and Ninox [3] they are having different user base than good old FoxPro. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_FoxPro 2: https://airtable.com 3: https://ninoxdb.de/en/
Seconded! I'm working in a spiritual replacement ( http://tablam.org ) but with first-class support for mobile. I'm starting with a relational language, then a bridge to native UI Toolkits. Embed sqlite and good support for others RDBMS and as a larger hope, a custom RDBMS on top of LMDB or WiredTiger.
Why not SQL Lite?
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#538Picasa (desktop app). It hit a sweet spot for me - linux compatible, very easy to do the majority of simple edits (crop, rotate, colour tweaks), and a few other nice features. The only significant failing was that it couldn't handle removable media at all well. Shotwell is the best I've found so far, but it's not quite the right feature balance for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
For my research I have scripts that scrape various sites, downloading images and encoding the web page info into the JPG IPTC metadata fields. Upon opening Picasa, it automatically detects the newly scraped photos and imports them along with the IPTC data, which can then be searched. Picasa is amazing for its speed, indexing, and use of metadata. I wish Google had open-sourced it. I have no interest in loading these…
Are your scripts available? I do something similar but hadn't thought about encoding the web page info into the JPG.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really hope Purism's Librem5 pans out for this very reason. A third alternative. I don't want Windows Phone, since that would not buy me much more privacy than Android with today's Microsoft, so having an open 3rd party mobile platform would be the solution here, I think.
I agree it is an exciting phone, but what are the privacy gains versus an android phone with lineageOS and f-droid foss apps? AFAIK it's just the baseband code. Convincing regular users that opensourcing the baseband will solve any problems seems pretty DOA when you have the very visible google play services tracking issue and no on cares.
> what are the privacy gains versus an android phone with lineageOS and f-droid foss apps?
Google oozes from every part of Android. I very much doubt that installing LineageOS with closed-source blobs for most of the hardware makes Google/NSA/OEMs completely unaware of your activity. Moreover, Android is such a critical piece of software that probably every significant 3 letter agency in the world has some sort of a backdoor in/to it. Android suffers a security fiasco quite often and the update situation is quite awful. Lineage is also often not as stable as one'd like and the update process from one major version to another can be itself nerve-wrecking.
On the technical side, it is running ancient, out-of-tree kernels that lack a lot of the security work going upstream, which is especially concerning considering there's a new Spectre variant patch in practically every release.
Lastly, having the full GNU/Linux experience in my pocket is something I've always wanted.
Whether 'regular users' care about this is not particularly concerning to me, as I think the 'enthusiast crowd' is large enough to get the ecosystem started and once we feel comfortable recommending this to our 'regular' family members and friends, they need not to be aware of any of the additional benefits - it would be just the new smartphone that they have.
Re: Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?
#540[deleted]