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Time Till Open Source Alternative

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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#11

Post by TAForObvReasons »

Gigachad wrote: post #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 th…

This is very simple to understand: in the long run, price tends to marginal cost of production. Open source represents the logical endpoint: since marginal cost of software is ~0, the endpoint is something with price ~0. SaaS is a response, but open source is already chipping away at the low end.

As for the general thought about experts, consider web browsers. Advancing the state of the art is extremely expensive, yet the browser vendors are more or less forced to give it away for free. The browsers that either charged money or weren't open source ... for the most part died out.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#12

Post by cowtools »

Gigachad wrote: post #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 th…

You only have to build the alternative once. Yes, there have been some areas where proprietary software has held its ground, but has done just that- it has not replaced free software in the areas that it has control over.

The takeover of free software may be slow, but it is one-directional.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#13

Post by Ygg2 »

Gigachad wrote: post #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 th…

Well on one hand OSS did make Blender which is moving towards a defacto standard in game making at least.

Otoh nothing prohibits another OSS software appearing and stealing an OSS incumbent's thunder. See Krita and Gimp.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#15

Post by wizzledonker »

kuon wrote: post #6

While 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 i…

My recent experience with OpenCASCADE is that since the new FUSE algorithm was introduced for Boolean operations with fuzzy values [0] the library itself is definitely up to par for professional use. (Although it’s unfortunate that many API entry points do not advertise their newer versions, and many developers end up using slower, legacy algorithms). Recent development trajectory on OpenCASCADE has been quite impressive.

What’s missing is a compelling user application now, and this is tarnished by the kernels existing reputation. Case in point, shapr (an iOS CAD modelling app) switched away from OpenCASCADE in 2017, before development trajectory really took off [1]

Also, when searching OpenCASCADE in Google, you get hacker news comments like this [2]

[0]https://dev.opencascade.org/content/fuzzy-boolean-operations [1] https://discourse.shapr3d.com/t/shapr3d-3-0-is-here-and-it-s... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536518

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#16

Post by ekianjo »

Ygg2 wrote: post #13
Gigachad wrote: post #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 th…

Well on one hand OSS did make Blender which is moving towards a defacto standard in game making at least. Otoh nothing prohibits another OSS software appearing and stealing an OSS incumbent's thunder. See Krita and Gimp.

Krita is nothing like GIMP

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#17

Post by glasshug »

cowtools wrote: post #12
Gigachad wrote: post #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 th…

You only have to build the alternative once. Yes, there have been some areas where proprietary software has held its ground, but has done just that- it has not replaced free software in the areas that it has control over. The takeover of free software may be slow, but it is one-directional.

I wish this were true! But keeping your software current in 2022 is an continuous project. UIs improve, platforms shift, features expand, vulns appear, needs change, server bills need to be paid.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#19

Post by Ygg2 »

ekianjo wrote: post #16
Ygg2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well on one hand OSS did make Blender which is moving towards a defacto standard in game making at least. Otoh nothing prohibits another OSS software appearing and stealing an OSS incumbent's thunder. See Krita and Gimp.

Krita is nothing like GIMP

To an extent, yes. But as someone who likes to draw and not edit pictures, they fill a similar niche.

I mean I heard people use Blender as a Gimp replacement. Because it can edit huge number of files in a batch.

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