Time Till Open Source Alternative
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Time Till Open Source Alternative
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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#2>All software will be open source, and no one will make money with software.
I'm really not convinced. The chart shows Photoshop having an alternative in with GIMP in 1998. And 24 years later, people are still paying lots of money for Photoshop. Pretty much all of these examples are similar. Yes open source has replaced some categories of paid software like VCS, but in a way it just opened up more paid software in the form of hosts and surrounding tooling like Github and paid git guis.
If anything I think we have moved backwards. We are no longer looking at making copies of grep and dd. If you want to make an actual alternative to Photoshop you'll need thousands of workers spread over a lot of skill sets. You need cloud technology specialists, AI/ML experts, R&D, design experts to do real studies and interviews with users, etc. You need teams of people working on out there new and untested ideas pushing the state of the art for image editing. While the alternatives are still trying to catch up to 2015 UI design patterns.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#3> all software will be open source, and no one will make money with software.
The first half of that statement doesn't imply the second half at all.
Perhaps, in the future, companies will see the writing on the wall and plan on re-licensing their software under an open licence once they have made a profit from their initial investment (and built a community to maintain the code base going forwards).
Taking that idea to an extreme, companies could use a crowd-funding campaign to provide the initial capital, and make the code available under an open licence even while it is still being written.
The only hurdle to implementing that model is finding a community of people who would value some piece of software that doesn't exist yet, and who don't mind waiting for it to be created, although the crowd-funding could be done on a per-feature basis.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#4When is there going to be OSS alternative to Windows? No, Linux doesn't count. It's good for servers but terrible desktop experience.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#5Only a scant handful of the open source alternatives in that table (Linux, git, gitlab, audacity, vlc media player) are compelling, if we use some measure of adoption as compelling. Most of the rest are all but unknown or so sparsely used as to be negligible compared to the software they supposedly displaced or will displace.
My (probably controversial) opinion is that this is because many (most) of these alternatives are developed by people with an ideology as their agenda rather than to meet market demands. The OSS alternatives in almost every case are inferior in terms of features and usability as a result of this.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#6While I am a big proponent of open source, a few are not good enough yet. The most important one being CAD. No CAD is good enough for serious mechanical engineering except commercial ones. The creative software (GIMP, inkscape) can replace Adobe but they are much harder yo use with worse integration between them. In the other direction, some OSS software are just way better than the commercial solution (I'd put OBS in those).
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#7Only a scant handful of the open source alternatives in that table (Linux, git, gitlab, audacity, vlc media player) are compelling, if we use some measure of adoption as compelling. Most of the rest are all but unknown or so sparsely used as to be negligible compared to the software they supposedly displaced or will displace. My (probably controversial) opinion is that this is because many (most) of these alternative…
I don't think the problem is that the development is agenda driven. It's more that the "last 10%" of work takes 99% of the effort. These alternatives look very good on a checkbox list but when you actually try to use them they just don't hold up and the work to get them there is immense. It's why almost relevant software has an army of workers behind them and more than just developers.
A few devs on there own are never going to be able to keep up.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#8Only a scant handful of the open source alternatives in that table (Linux, git, gitlab, audacity, vlc media player) are compelling, if we use some measure of adoption as compelling. Most of the rest are all but unknown or so sparsely used as to be negligible compared to the software they supposedly displaced or will displace. My (probably controversial) opinion is that this is because many (most) of these alternative…
I don't think the problem is that the development is agenda driven. It's more that the "last 10%" of work takes 99% of the effort. These alternatives look very good on a checkbox list but when you actually try to use them they just don't hold up and the work to get them there is immense. It's why almost relevant software has an army of workers behind them and more than just developers. A few devs on there own are nev…
I think our points are aligned. The agenda driven nature of the genesis of these alternatives is part of the reason few developers work on them. Which, as you note, is why the “last 10%” doesn’t get done.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#9It is unsurprising to me that any software that was launched within the last couple years that also has an open source alternative would have had that open source alternative developed in less than a couple years time...
(I know the article mentions thr "blind spot" in the chart further down, but that's such a glaringly obvious issue that just acknowledging it as an issue doesn't make the conclusion any less absurd)
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#10That graph with the green 'blind spot' deserves some praise. A lot of people might have missed the (in hindsight) obvious censoring problem with the data and just ran with the conclusion that the duration is decreasing rapidly.