81–90 of 283 posts
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...
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 s…
All of these companies are following the ridiculous 0 to 1 monopoly model of growth and are wasting a ton of money trying to capture any market that they can get their hands on. It's not sustainable and the gig workers are paying the price. There's no doubt that they're providing a valuable service that could have spurred growth for the middle class, but instead they're using VC money to undercut existing businesses in hope of building the next Google.
For those who are interested, one promising project is SU2:
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!
Consider Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom. Many people (including me) would love to see those supported on Linux, or even better, be out-classed by open-source software, e.g. Gimp and Darktable.
Gimp and Darktable truly are wonderful pieces of software. But they aren't yet compelling enough to cause a mass-migration by professional photographs. Another example would be Microsoft Office vs. LibreOffice.
So you may need to refine your goals a little: Do you want to (a) fill a gap where no viable OSS exists, or (b) help OSS dethrone proprietary software in some category, e.g. Photoshop?
> So a person who is thinking about creating a new open source project can get the idea and start making a alternative?
I cringe when I read that, because I've asked that question many times for myself, and I never ended up following through. I think there's some wisdom in the notion that the best OSS project idea is one that solves a problem you have. Otherwise it's just too hard to really see it through.
Such software also doesn't get used enough to be trustworthy as far as results without some other big companies using it to do things with and testing the results. What company is going to trust their product designs to the results of a bunch of open-source code with no company standing behind it?
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...
My dream is to have not only an Access/Excel(in the role of pseudo-table programming) alternative, but one that could work great in a iPad/mobile device.
Also, in this space, most "options" are fully on the cloud.
Thats cool, but will never be a real challenger to Access or Excel if depend on cloud 100%. I need it to work fully standalone.
My first programming language was FoxPro. I know what it look like to "live the dream". One single language and environment and you TRULY code ALL the app: Db, logic, forms, reports, web services, etc.
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BTW: why start with a relational lang? The MAIN power of the dbase/fox family above access was to have a truly tailored language for the task. With office, you MUST work from a paradigm (Access:Relational, Excel:Reactive functional) and become an inferior procedural maybe OO developer (VBA) to finish stuff. The dissonance is heavy.
photoshop. Gimp has the functionalities, but its usability is poor.
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…
On the Free side, I think one reason is the copyleft nature of the GPL. Another pattern indicator is how modular the software is - smaller bits are easier to open source than massive projects - and the general inclinations of the programmers, their bosses, and their legal teams.
That being said, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a Free alternative to AutoCAD in 2020. (Pipes 3D is an AutoCAD extention). It's widely used software across numerous industries, much like Photoshop, Illustrator or Audition, but there is no Free alternative that I'm aware of.
A particularly annoying thing to me here is that AVEVA was actually originally developed and owned by the British government, but it was privatized (I think under Thatcher.) I think the value created for the tax payer would have been much greater to create free tools and software and make them available to everybody rather than just whatever pittance they got from selling it during a privatization firesale.