It's weird that Node-RED is listed as closed source software? But it is open source? https://github.com/node-red
Thanks for pointing this out, fixed!
Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools
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Re: Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools
#72Some additional ideas: - Kanban - Kanboard ( https://github.com/kanboard/kanboard ) - Analytics - Matomo ( https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo ) - Content Management System - Grav ( https://github.com/getgrav/grav ) - Knowledge Base - BookStack ( https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack ) - Browser - Firefox ( https://github.com/mozilla ) - Image Manipulation ( https://github.com/GNOME/gimp ) - Observability Platfo…
app.keeweb.info for a great pw manager off of keepass too.. Its my goto for every platform!
Re: Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a good way to get an understanding of this is to start a company yourself. You’ll quickly learn why businesses make the decision to pay for software instead of cobbling together open source. Let’s say you’re a small, but growing company doing $2M ARR. You absolutely could run your email marketing using an open source tool hooked up to Amazon SES and save a thousand bucks a month over something like Mailchimp.…
> If it wastes 8 hours of employee time per month, that’s another $1k a month lost… it’ll require expensive developer time (likely costing the company $1000-$1500/day per engineer all-in) That's not universally true, of course. That money would buy you a week of developer time in most of Europe, and even a month of developer time in some developing economies.
> That money would buy you a week of developer time in most of Europe
That's only true if you live in Poland and also ignore the all-in cost of your employees. A good rule of thumb is to assume 2-3x salary for the all-in cost of having a workforce.
Re: Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it wastes 8 hours of employee time per month, that’s another $1k a month lost… it’ll require expensive developer time (likely costing the company $1000-$1500/day per engineer all-in) That's not universally true, of course. That money would buy you a week of developer time in most of Europe, and even a month of developer time in some developing economies.
> That money would buy you a week of developer time in most of Europe That's only true if you live in Poland and also ignore the all-in cost of your employees. A good rule of thumb is to assume 2-3x salary for the all-in cost of having a workforce.
I run a business and employ several software developers. What you are saying has absolutely not been my experience.
Re: Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools
#75GitBook is not open source.
Thanks for pointing out, fixed!
Re: Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools
#76Everytime I look into B2B software space (I am a complete outsider, btw), I see that here and there always pop up some new company, offering something similar to competitors and what can be stiched together using open source (and almost free, not counting the support) tools. How these companies thrive? Why customers keep buying new stuff, when there are solutions already to most of the business neeeds out there (and…
I live on both sides of this divide, so maybe I can offer my 2 cents: * Created & maintain Gensim and other open source, used by thousands of companies for free. * Created & sell an (unrelated) B2B product. Yes, I've had B2B prospects who thought they could "stitch my product together using open source". These people are invariably either low budget & high-maintenance, or unsophisticated = don't realize how much work…
This sounds so familiar. I have worked in several startups that were commercializing NLP-based solutions for different problems.
The approach of management (although relatively educated in the field, but obviously not knowledgeable in everything) was essentially expecting from their research engineers:
- look into state-of-the-art related to our problem - think very hard about how to apply the academic state-of-the-art to our problem - stitch a fully fletched software solution together
The problem obviously emerged reliably in the last step, which was supposed to take negligible time and should be done by more junior team members (because they were not smart enough for step 2).
The result was a bunch of prototypes running in production, and huge costs for keeping the whole thing somehow running.
Re: Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools
#77Everytime I look into B2B software space (I am a complete outsider, btw), I see that here and there always pop up some new company, offering something similar to competitors and what can be stiched together using open source (and almost free, not counting the support) tools. How these companies thrive? Why customers keep buying new stuff, when there are solutions already to most of the business neeeds out there (and…
This question may be easier to understand in the general case: why don’t people do everything themselves?
Why don’t people paint their own houses? Why don’t people fix their own cars? Why don’t people sew their own clothes? Why don’t people cook their own food?
Of course a lot of people do do these things themselves! Just like a lot of people do use free and/or open source software tools.
But a lot of people don’t do these things, at least not all of them, and probably not all the time. If you can think of the reasons you pay for things you might be able to do yourself, you can start to understand why a business does too. It usually comes down to opportunity cost and specialization—answering the question “how is my limited time best spent?”
Re: Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools
#78Everytime I look into B2B software space (I am a complete outsider, btw), I see that here and there always pop up some new company, offering something similar to competitors and what can be stiched together using open source (and almost free, not counting the support) tools. How these companies thrive? Why customers keep buying new stuff, when there are solutions already to most of the business neeeds out there (and…
I think a good way to get an understanding of this is to start a company yourself. You’ll quickly learn why businesses make the decision to pay for software instead of cobbling together open source. Let’s say you’re a small, but growing company doing $2M ARR. You absolutely could run your email marketing using an open source tool hooked up to Amazon SES and save a thousand bucks a month over something like Mailchimp.…
This is where the maxim of open source being 'free as in puppies not free as in beer/lunch' comes from.
I started my career in open source and still strongly believe in FOSS tenets, but enterprises are looking more to de-risk their projects and platforms.
Risk is reduced when you have a vendor you can hold accountable for issues in the product, hence making proprietary solutions (and sometimes open source but wrapped in enterprise support solutions) the only viable choice for a business.
Re: Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools
#79You're missing Drupal, one of the largest open-source CMS' in the world.
Re: Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a good way to get an understanding of this is to start a company yourself. You’ll quickly learn why businesses make the decision to pay for software instead of cobbling together open source. Let’s say you’re a small, but growing company doing $2M ARR. You absolutely could run your email marketing using an open source tool hooked up to Amazon SES and save a thousand bucks a month over something like Mailchimp.…
This is where the maxim of open source being 'free as in puppies not free as in beer/lunch' comes from. I started my career in open source and still strongly believe in FOSS tenets, but enterprises are looking more to de-risk their projects and platforms. Risk is reduced when you have a vendor you can hold accountable for issues in the product, hence making proprietary solutions (and sometimes open source but wrapped…
While I understand and generally agree with your points, I do find the idea of "holding a vendor accountable" to be more of a philosophy than something I've generally witnessed happen in real life. At some point that needs to stop being weighed on the scales when doing "build vs buy" math for any but the largest companies or most attentive vendors.