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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"?

#71

Post by rsayers »

haunter wrote: post #61

Early days torrent scene ran on proprietary adware clients like BitTorrent itself, µTorrent, and BitComet but nowadays open source clients are more popular and recommended by most trackers. I'm on a pretty big private tracker and almost everyone (+95%) is using qBittorrent, Transmission, or rTorrent. Though Vuze was also one of the earliest clients and it's also open source for some reasons it never really became pop…

I used Vuze for a bit back in the day, it was a resource hog on whatever I was running it on. I think I mostly stuck with uTorrent until switching to the open source alternatives.

I actually use all three you mentioned in different contexts.

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

#72

Post by yen223 »

Javascript is a funny one.

Javascript being an open standard meant there were no barriers to re-implementing them on alternative browsers. So when Internet Explorer started to lose its throne to Chrome and Firefox, Javascript survived while VBScript did not. When Apple decided to introduce webkit but not Flash to iOS, Javascript survived while Flash did not.

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

#73

Post by jimbobthrowawy »

jimbokun wrote: post #54
sebastiansm wrote: post #41

R or the Python Scientific stack over SAS or SPSS.

Or MATLAB.

I think GNU Octave is the free software MATLAB alternative. Since it aims to be highly compatible and run the same code. Various python stacks do more things, and do them differently.

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

#76

Post by Yawrehto »

Wait, has no one mentioned LibreOffice yet? 200 million active users (!) seems like it's successful enough. Admittedly, it hasn't really challenged Microsoft Office yet, but it's growing, and also it's hard to look at something with 200 million active users and say 'that's a failure'. Definitely an alternative though.

There's also uBlock Origin, but I don't know if it's the largest adblocker yet. It should be, though. I think it is a serious competitor, even in terms of market share, to many major for-profit adblockers.

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

#77

Post by mrcsharp »

With how anti-consumer the recent Plex moves have been, Jellyfin [1] has gotten really popular among self-hosting community. It is arguably the best alternative to Plex in terms of features and the amount of freedom given to the user.

[1] https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin

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

#80

Post by ray_v »

mrcsharp wrote: post #77

With how anti-consumer the recent Plex moves have been, Jellyfin [1] has gotten really popular among self-hosting community. It is arguably the best alternative to Plex in terms of features and the amount of freedom given to the user. [1] https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin

Plex really does have a lot going for it with the really nice Apps -- Plexamp works especially well with large music libraries. I hadn't used Jellyfin in some time, but I went to set it up last week, and it's still not as simple as Plex is. Really wish the Jellyfin folks would put together a docker compose setup that run nginx and lets encrypt for example.
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