Interestingly, this list mostly covers desktop applications and social media. There's a couple of outliers, like Linux, the Siri and Google translate alternatives, but I noticed many missing categories. Relational databases, accounting & tax preparation, CRM, document management, and so on.
Time Till Open Source Alternative
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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#32In many cases I use opensource. In a few instances I want a company that supports their products, makes bug-fixes, and is responsive to the concerns and needs of my company. In yet other cases, I need to prove the utility and deterministic longevity of software without philosophical arguments. Yes, much software that is opensource is not as good as for-profit software.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#33I have thought this for a while. Open Source/Free software is like the Jason Voorhees in those old Friday the 13th movies (although with more positive effects). Sure you can outrun him for a while, but he is unstoppable and while you tire, he never will.
The economic factors that can undermine a closed-source project, and that seemingly inevitably will undermine most closed-source projects one day, have little to no effect on an open source one. An open source project just needs developer mind share and users, and it can go on indefinitely. And it doesn't need a lot. Maybe just 5-10 developers and a 100 users or so and it will keep progressing. And with a global developer and userbase to draw from, that is not a hard number to achieve.
Just look at Haiku OS.
That project by all rights should be dead. But 20 years have passed and it is still very much alive. And it keeps getting better. And one day who knows.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#34>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…
There's a reliable test for predicting the success of failure of open source software: "Does it directly interact with users?"
If the answer is yes, OSS has mostly been an alternative option but not the first choice. (With all due respect and deference to the work put in by OSS GUI teams!)
If the answer is no, and especially if it's a shared need but not the primary product (e.g. kernel, web server, intermediate processing step), then OSS has taken over the world.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#35> Two things become clear with this chart... Second, the trend is downward
Um... No. The "trend" is due to the fact we don't know the future.
Seriously, it takes about 7-10 years for a OS project to take off, so you won't be seeing the 10 year replacements for proprietary software from 5 years ago.
The "trend" looks like more of a random distribution which narrows as it gets closer to the present.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#36When is there going to be OSS alternative to Windows? No, Linux doesn't count. It's good for servers but terrible desktop experience.
Funnily enough, Linux may be one of the few projects in the "alternatives" column that _is_ viable :)
Well, until you want to run Photoshop or Ableton.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#37>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…
GIMP is a good alternative to Photoshop for someone like me, who is not a professional designer, just someone who needs to touch up an occasional picture. So what GIMP has done is removing my "need" to run an illegal copy of Photoshop (a practice I really hated and stopped with a long time ago). If I'm a professional user of anything, I should be ready to pay for it. Else hard to claim I'm a professional.
What the article should acknowledge is the difference between an alternative and the shift of which tool is... the gold standard.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#38When is there going to be OSS alternative to Windows? No, Linux doesn't count. It's good for servers but terrible desktop experience.
Very good question. The answer doesn't exist today, unless somehow billions of dollars pours into ReactOS for it to be compatible with Windows 11, but another utopian and unrealistic chance of that happening. We are looking for a full desktop open source to Windows so GNU/Linux doesn't count as an alternative, and neither does Wine. But the closest to answering that is ReactOS despite it not being a realistic alterna…
I meant a modern GUI oriented OS that's stable (see glibc 2.36 breaking EAC and other apps*) and nice to develop for.
Compatibility with Windows or POSIX would be amazing but not required.
* Yeah, I get it. Changing from `DT_HASH` to `DT_GNU_HASH` had to happen at some point. Backwards compatibility is a real chore, and not what glibc maintainers bound themselves to.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#39>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…
There's a reliable test for predicting the success of failure of open source software: "Does it directly interact with users?" If the answer is yes, OSS has mostly been an alternative option but not the first choice. (With all due respect and deference to the work put in by OSS GUI teams!) If the answer is no, and especially if it's a shared need but not the primary product (e.g. kernel, web server, intermediate proc…
Not totally, not till Oracle has been tipped into the dustbin of history. (Come the day!)
I think Cisco still uses proprietary software too.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#40The chart is interesting because it misses the important part - it covers time, but not adoption.
For example, adoption of GIMP has not likely materially increased over time (as a relative percent of total addressable market)
IMHO, what the author gets wrong what so many people who claim this (they are not the first, or the last) get wrong - open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure. (and pretty good at infrastructure products).
If you go look at areas where an open source thing is a de-facto market-leader, they are mostly infrastructure. Not all, but the ones that aren't have clear product management of some sort.
That is - the good open source products are often built/driven either by extremely product focused people (This is rare), or by companies driving them with PMs.
Not that the engineering doesn't matter - of course it does, but if you want a good and successful product, engineering is just a part of what is needed. Sometimes not even the main part!
Open source focuses mainly on the engineering part, often creating technical meritocracies that focus on making "The technically best software".
This is totally cool, but also totally orthogonal to building "a good product that people want to use".
Secondarily, you have the issue of survival in marketplace (IE There are a rash of OSS companies achieving near 100% of total addressable market share, and still going bankrupt due to inability to monetize). This, however, is not as big an issue as the first (as people can always still pick it all up when that happens)
Open source could always get better at products, but its historical development models were geared towards exactly the above (IE it does what it says on the tin)