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Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

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Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#61

Post by jakemal »

m_ke wrote: post #52

Uber/Seamless/Postmates/Airbnb or any other middleman service. There's no reason why they should be getting away with extracting 30-40% of the revenue for facilitating a simple transaction.

I think this is something that seems reasonable at first, but in practice would get incredibly unwieldy. There is much more to what they do than connect buyers and sellers. They also resolve conflicts, navigate different laws in countless locales, and handle payments/chargebacks to name a few.

These companies are also taking a giant cut but still losing money. Granted they are spending money on things that an open source alternative wouldn't necessarily spend money on, but I don't think very many of them are anywhere close to being profitable even without the extra spending.

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#62

Post by wskemper »

I'm surprised no one has said "PowerPoint" yet. LibreOffice and Google Slides are nowhere close. Animations, theming, diagramming tools... I run an Ubuntu laptop and have been missing PowerPoint so much I tried to get a Windows VM for it. Couldn't get graphics support in VirtualBox working correctly :(

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#63

Post by benologist »

muzani wrote: post #41
pathartl wrote: post #17

Not completely on topic, but I fear we're rapidly losing many video games of yesteryear to time and their closed-source nature. Luckily, milestone games like Doom and Quake were open sourced some time ago. There's reverse engineering of some codebases like Rollercoaster Tycoon, Diablo, and Super Mario 64, but for 99% of games we'll never see them outside of the original release or an emulator.

I learned programming mostly from reverse engineering open source games. Would be great to see this happen more.

I would love to see a pervasive culture of copying proprietary games as open source projects, which we see with a lot of non-game software. Open source should be keeping old games alive and loved, instead old games are being clawed back to re-monetize.

There is some open source games, but not many and all the old console games are simple and graphically/audio simple, all the old PC games, it's really only modern AAA titles that have tons of complex assets and would be hard to 'open source clone of X'.

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#65

Post by ailideex »

m_ke wrote: post #52

Uber/Seamless/Postmates/Airbnb or any other middleman service. There's no reason why they should be getting away with extracting 30-40% of the revenue for facilitating a simple transaction.

And yet with taking 30-40% of revenue (as you claim) Uber is still running at a loss.

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#66

Post by spectramax »

Mizza wrote: post #58

Two that I have encountered: Aspera: a high-performance data transfer suit, used in genetics and the film industry. I wrote a blog post about it a year ago and still get near-daily emails asking me if there is an open source alternative yet. QUIC may provide a basis for a solution, but it needs to be explored. PDMS: software for planning, modeling and simulating oil and gas plants. Main two commercial suites are AVEV…

Open source projects tend to emerge when there is general access to the purpose of that project. You can't expect an open source project for Ocean-based Wind Turbine simulation or molecular synthesis of Organochloride compounds.

They're niche industries that require tremendous amount of upfront investment, in both physical assets to realize the utility of the open-source project, and knowledge-base required to operate the software.

On the other hand, you could have a piece of software that requires niche knowledge but its used literally everywhere - for e.g. OpenSSL. Not many people can contribute to it, yet it exists as open source. The point I am trying to make is that OpenSSL and your quantum hardware control software are very different things.

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#68

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

georgewsinger wrote: post #49

Don't try to copy a closed-source project. Instead, invent something completely new (something that's 10x better than what it might "replace"), and make it open-source.

... and half your potential user base will say "what the hell is this crap, it is totally unintuitive and doesn't do the things i need it to" ... sigh.

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#69

Post by whorleater »

Mizza wrote: post #58

Two that I have encountered: Aspera: a high-performance data transfer suit, used in genetics and the film industry. I wrote a blog post about it a year ago and still get near-daily emails asking me if there is an open source alternative yet. QUIC may provide a basis for a solution, but it needs to be explored. PDMS: software for planning, modeling and simulating oil and gas plants. Main two commercial suites are AVEV…

Aspera is among the most frustrating technologies I've been forced to use. I used to work at a video website where we would acquire film files from studios directly, and the amount of times Aspera would fritz out easily justified the time to try and develop and internal alternative. We ended up terminating all the Aspera connections at a service and transferring over direct datagrams for the rest.

Re: Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

#70

Post by katsura »

billconan wrote: post #19

photoshop. Gimp has the functionalities, but its usability is poor.

One time I started working on one open source alternative, but one big problem I found was that their PSD file documentation was incorrect at a few places, and it lags behind what is currently available.

And though Photopea[0] is not open source, it can mostly get things done for my minimal use-cases.

[0] https://www.photopea.com/

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