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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"?

#91

Post by saghm »

riazmuns19 wrote: post #86

OBS Studio - I found this to be a very valuable and successful application for video and audio editing, with some amazing companies sponsoring them. - https://obsproject.com/

I first heard of OBS from Twitch streamers talking about using it years ago, and I was taken back when finding out later that it's open source and works well on Linux. I had mistakenly assumed it must be gaming-specific Windows thing because it didn't even occur to me that it could end up being so widely used by that demographic otherwise.

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

#92

Post by ramon156 »

simantel wrote: post #67

GitLab is definitely the most obvious success at $600M+ in revenue, but a couple new ones are Cal.com and PostHog. Cal.com is open-source Calendly, has raised $32M, and shares their stats publicly: https://cal.com/open PostHog is open-source Mixpanel/Amplitude, has raised $39M, and appears to be widely recommended these days.

Codeberg is a nice upcoming one aswell!

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

#95

Post by lccerina »

gpm wrote: post #22

Examples I haven't seen mentioned yet: Firefox. Atom/VSCode (Sublime Text clones). Android (iOS clone). Various databases (postgres, mongodb, etc). Reddit (Digg alternative, since closed source) though I'm not sure releasing their source code had anything to do with their success. HashiCorp in general sort of counts though it's harder to say "it was competing against X".

Android is not a iOS clone, and open source-ish (Google still decides the roadmap)

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

#96

Post by hnthr_w_y »

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…

> Though Vuze was also one of the earliest clients and it's also open source for some reasons it never really became popular. Maybe because it's a Java client?

Funny story there.

Vuze had an addon/plugin system of sorts. Rather popular addons were the ones that allowed you to 'fake upload'.

Vuze didn't have this built-in or anything, but it just made it easier.

For that reason basically any and every version was banned from the reputable trackers of the day, private, obviously.

For the users of public trackers, this is obviously irrelevant but that basically killed it right there and then, in time.

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

#97

Post by piyuv »

jimbokun wrote: post #55
dublinben wrote: post #27

cURL is ubiquitous. It's unclear whether there is even a proprietary alternative still being sold commercially.

Postman seems like the main proprietary competitor for the same use cases.

Isn’t it just a curl gui, using curl under the hood ?

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

#99

Post by ilt »

poikroequ wrote: post #84
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…

While it's been known as Vuze for a long time now, it was originally known as Azureus. It was pretty popular at one point. Then uTorrent came out which was super lightweight in comparison, so it quickly gained popularity... at least before it became riddled with adware. Java clients were typically very bloated on older PCs, and Vuze was no exception.

Wasn't Azuerus the one with 3d views of seeds and peers? It was crazy to see that in a torrent client at the time.. I remember it getting very bloated and rebranded to Vuze before I left it for other smaller and faster clients
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