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Time Till Open Source Alternative

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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#71

Post by musicale »

jahewson wrote: post #54
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> It was done to crush Netscape and it worked

It would have been interesting to see how things would have turned out had Microsoft been able to continue integrating the OS and web browser.

At this point I expect most users expect the OS to include a web browser and would consider it deficient otherwise. I'm not sure if it's even possible to replace Chrome with Firefox on ChromeOS.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#72

Post by musicale »

jahewson wrote: post #54
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> the idea of giving it away free was to distort the market. It was done to crush Netscape

Oh this is interesting:

> [Netscape Navigator] Version 3.0 was also available in a "Gold" version which featured a WYSIWYG HTML editor (later added to Netscape Communicator as a standard feature), and was sold as retail software for profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_(web_browser)

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#73

Post by paulryanrogers »

This rings true for all my personal products. Last one I built and soft launched quietly. Then within a year there was a FOSS project covering the same killer feature, that none of my commercial competitors had (or have yet). Previous product had a FOSS alternative within six months.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#74

Post by woleium »

it happens the other way too. I used to contribute to a small ssl VPN project (adito) that was 'aquired' by barracuda networks. It was forked and picked up by OpenVPN (as openvpn-als) but development stopped. I believe it's still updated internally and forms part of Barracudas firewall offering.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#75

Post by zamadatix »

bsder wrote: post #67
DannyBee wrote: post #40

The 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…

> For example, adoption of GIMP has not likely materially increased over time (as a relative percent of total addressable market) This is an interesting question to me because Adobe only recently moved to cloud/subscription fairly recently. Before that, you could get a physical copy of Photoshop and keep it running forever. As that pathway fades, it will be interesting to see if something will finally supplant Photos…

Hasn't it been a full decade since the last perpetually licensed Photoshop?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#76

Post by threatofrain »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #70
DannyBee wrote: post #40

The 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…

This is also why Google sucks at so many things, despite having the best offering on paper. GCP is honestly great, but a terrible product. Stadia? Zillion chat apps? Google Inbox by Gmail by Google? Google wallet pay Android pay wallet? They all work great and would be best in class if they were decent products and you could figure out how to get them to work at all.

Why is GCP bad?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#77

Post by eru »

zamadatix wrote: post #75
bsder wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, adoption of GIMP has not likely materially increased over time (as a relative percent of total addressable market) This is an interesting question to me because Adobe only recently moved to cloud/subscription fairly recently. Before that, you could get a physical copy of Photoshop and keep it running forever. As that pathway fades, it will be interesting to see if something will finally supplant Photos…

Hasn't it been a full decade since the last perpetually licensed Photoshop?

I guess five years ago you could still easily use a five year old pirated photoshop?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#78

Post by smegsicle »

travisjungroth wrote: post #62
DannyBee wrote: post #40

The 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…

I have this hunch you could break into product management by product managing open source projects. You'd certainly learn some good skills if you could do it. It would be pure influence over authority.

if you can herd a cat, you can herd a sheep

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#79

Post by whateveracct »

glasshug wrote: post #17
cowtools wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People still use programs like grafx2 and klystrack. They don't need big updates - they are what they are and do what they do nicely.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#80

Post by eru »

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…

> 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. [...]

I'd see that as making progress, not moving backwards!

It means open source has solved the 'easy' cases, and only the harder ones remain.

(It's a bit like after humans have visited the moon, complaining that going to Mars will require more effort; and saying that this means we have moved backwards.)

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