The table is questionable.
Firefox isnt an alternative to netscape, its literally a fork.
Why is 7zip the alternative to winzip and not gzip?
Etc
Time Till Open Source Alternative
51–60 of 340 posts
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#52I feel like there's one area where open-source cannot universally replace closed-source: complex products that need to be extremely polished. Some people might be able to swap, but not everyone. An example is the desktop: I've used Linux for over a decade and still do but I recently added an M1 Mac and the hardware+software is just so much better for certain kinds of content creation. Video editing is another. I've tried a dozen video editors and while Shotcut is one of the best open-source ones, it's blown away by Davinci Resolve.
Raw photo editing is another area. Open-source has achieved some success here with darktable, and I personally use that, but it certainly can't (easily) replace some closed-source alternatives for everyone, especially in some more commercial photography settings.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#53Not on that list, an actual open-source alternative to Confluence and JIRA, and all of its features/plugins :(
i.e. Agile mode board, sprints, multi-project/issue keys, timesheets/time tracking, source control integration, epics and release management
Yes, some exist, but our experience is that practically none are as easy to use or feature complete as Confluence and JIRA.
(i.e. Not in the way that GitLab could be classed as a feature complete alternative to GitHub)
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#54>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, ye…
> in the long run, price tends to marginal cost of production
Ah but this principle applies to commodity markets, where prices rising above the marginal level would prompt an increase in production from competitors or new entrants to the market.
Software is not a commodity though, nobody other than Adobe makes Photoshop, we can’t increase production of Photoshop. People can create competing products, of course, but that’s just a regular competitive market. This is also why movies and ebooks don’t cost $0.
> browser vendors are more or less forced to give it away for free
Yes but that’s not because of the market, the idea of giving it away free was to distort the market. It was done to crush Netscape and it worked. Now it’s done to grab as many eyeballs as possible and keep competitors off your turf. I think it’s possible that we’ll return to paid web browsers when the interests of the vendors and the users are more closely aligned - in a sense Safari and Edge are already there, as they’re both priced-in to their respective OS’s.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#55When is there going to be OSS alternative to Windows? No, Linux doesn't count. It's good for servers but terrible desktop experience.
ReactOS, and approximately in 1998.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#56>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.
I think it's also worth noting that OSS did not 'make' Blender initially - it was a closed-source application. It's a resounding OSS success these days, but had already been 'productised' before the the release of the source.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#57> all software will be open source
There's a heck of a lot of "boring business software" out there, often quite niche, solving problems various businesses have. Anything that survives, just by virtue it has survived, has a positive ROI for everyone involved, including the customer.
Where is the supposed alternative going to come from?
Are people being paid to write that software suddenly going to stop and go build it for free? Are there random people that will suddenly develop an interest in figuring out how to automate filling out a bunch of Mississippi state government permit request forms, or how to convert an obsolete file format that's only used in the gas industry to another obsolete file format and FTP it somewhere, or how to convert customer orders to a cut lists used by a multi-million dollar industrial machine of which less than 100 exist in the world?
Are the customers (businesses) going to suddenly decide to hire up an engineering team and build this themselves, at probably higher cost than they pay today and definitely at way higher risk? Maybe they'll get together with a bunch of businesses with similar needs -- aka their competitors -- and pool their resources to build something?
I think none of this will happen -- or will happen in such exceedingly rare circumstances it's not worth considering.
Which means I'm pretty confident to say there will always be proprietary software.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#58It has been about 35 years since Illustrator was released and IMHO it still does a lot of things that Inkscape can't do. "Time Till High Quality Open Source Alternative" for that one is about 12.7k days and counting.
I also don't know a single professional artist who uses Gimp instead of Photoshop. Krita's gotten some traction; Wikipedia says that one was founded on June 21, 2005, which is about 15y after Photoshop.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#59> All software will be open source, and no one will make money with software. This is simply a very utopian claim and just isn't going to happen. One example is Microsoft Office which has been replaced by Google Docs / Office Online, etc and little to no-one installs LibreOffice directly. Unfortunately, closed-source software is here to stay and the only absolute here is: There isn't any.
This is only a utopian claim if you are a software developer who does not need to make money to live. Otherwise it's utterly dystopian and essentially reduces the developer to a provider of free labour. I sometimes think that open source is the greatest trick that late stage capitalism ever pulled.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
People will use anything instead of gimp to be honest. Haven't tried it in a while but everytime I did in the past I can't help but question if it's developers actually use their own software.
Not me. Whenever I try alternatives, I can't help but question if people who use GIMP alternatives actually tried reading the GIMP manual.