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

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71–80 of 283 posts

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

#71
post #50

Exchange. Imap and friends don't provide the seamless functionality that Exchange does. Contacts, calendar, permission sharing, group message folders. You just can't get close. I love OSS, but I have to recommend Exchange because their is no viable alternative.

This is true but happily I will never run it again thanks to office 365 and gmail.

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

#72
My dad aches after a good and powerful typesetting tool (for less technical users than *TeX is aimed at), in the vein of the Ventura Publisher of old. Nowadays it seems all about Adobe Indesign but the workflows seem inferior for many book-type workloads. Scribus needs a lot of help.

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

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Git doesn't really have that concept Of locking files? Sure it does; if two people modify the same piece of code, then there will be a merge conflict, and whoever's doing the merge will have the opportunity to reconcile those two versions. It's like a lock, but you don't have to think about it / explicitly lock and unlock the object you're editing. Combine this with rebasing (git-speak for "switch to the branch int…

Sometimes it is desirable to not have optimistic locking like git. Often you want to signal that you don't want a file/asset modified for a period.

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.

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

#75
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…

Your article is really interesting! I did not know about Aspera before reading it.

I did not have any idea that changing protocol will have this amount of benefit in data transmission. Also amused that no one have not solved it in Open Source world.

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

#76

Open-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?

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

#77
post #57
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 despite all that they’re still unprofitable. How would this be feasible as an open source project?

Because they're blowing insane amounts of money fueling unsustainable growth to satisfy their investors. This requires burning cash on user acquisition and hiring thousands of engineers to solve problems that they didn't need to have.

Craiglist is handling as much traffic as all of them with around 50 employees.

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

#78
This article about how Microsoft Access won't die got me thinking about creating an open source alternative. I just retired and am looking for a project. I also have a history with msft that might be helpful.

https://medium.com/young-coder/microsoft-access-the-zombie-d...

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

#79
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 operat…

Something like Cabinet Vision also too niche? Don't think there are really any serious open source contenders in that space.

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

#80

This article about how Microsoft Access won't die got me thinking about creating an open source alternative. I just retired and am looking for a project. I also have a history with msft that might be helpful. https://medium.com/young-coder/microsoft-access-the-zombie-d...

If there's a real, useful OSS alternative to Access then let me know. Otherwise you might be onto something!
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