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Time Till Open Source Alternative

staltz.com

81–90 of 340 posts

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#81
I like to think of this as a paradigm shift from businesses focusing on vertical integration where the same entity develops and maintains client- and server-side software and infrastructure and acts as the sole service provider, to a separation of service providers and software maintainers. It's a natural consequence of specialization and commoditization. We're already seeing this in cloud computing and databases. Case in point from OP: Dokku/Heroku. There is no reason why Dokku should have been a threat to Heroku. Ideally open-source tooling should only serve to strengthen someone like Heroku (whether they would have continued as a PaaS or pivoted to selling their software or other services around it). For a more recent example, I think the window for introducing another Netlify under the same model on the same scale is closing.

This is not bad news for business per se, it just requires a different strategy. If your service is solid, you should just be grateful that someone else can provide client software accommodating for users needs you may be neglecting or lacking the resources to accommodate. If you're a software builder it's a win to have a flourishing ecosystem of service providers for users to choose from, increasing the usefulness of your software and widening your market through the efforts of others.

If you have a proprietary API (openly documented or not) time is ticking.

Rent-seekers will struggle as their capabilities to hold customers hostage weaken. Businesses focusing on providing customer value (actual experienced value) should do well as long as they match their niche with their strengths.

Look at Tailscale. I think they get this.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can install Firefox on ChromeOS. (At least I've done it on ChromeOS Flex.) However, just like Windows 98 used Internet Explorer for some of its internals (eg the 'live' Desktop), so does ChromeOS use Chrome for eg tweaking the settings.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#83
post #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…

Most app store revenue comes from games. Some games (such as some puzzle games) are easy to clone and replace, but many are not.

More energy seems to be put into emulation of proprietary games than creation of new open source games.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#84
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We have a legit PS install on my wife’s machine and it’s preventing us from making a move to another computer for her. She’s a casual/non-professional user. She knows the app and how to use it. We aren’t interested in renting the app… basically we’re holding out on that machine, but sooner or later it’s going to become a security risk in our network.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the usual retort is that at any moment and for any inexplicable reason your entire infrastructure can be deleted for some reason you barely know let alone comprehend. This seems to be the case for apps at least.

I neither support nor deny this belief but it's an increasingly common impression.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#86
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We have a legit PS install on my wife’s machine and it’s preventing us from making a move to another computer for her. She’s a casual/non-professional user. She knows the app and how to use it. We aren’t interested in renting the app… basically we’re holding out on that machine, but sooner or later it’s going to become a security risk in our network.

At some point it might be worth looking into Affinity Photo, it's a $55 (one-time, with free updates) cross-platform photo manipulation program with surprising feature parity with Photoshop.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#87
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…

Good examples. OBS is definitely superior. As much as I would like open source creative software, I recommend the closed source Affinity Photo and Designer as Adobe alternatives. Very inexpensive and extremely simple to use.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

GCP tends to be designed for customers that are staffed with mostly Google engineers.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#89
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We have a legit PS install on my wife’s machine and it’s preventing us from making a move to another computer for her. She’s a casual/non-professional user. She knows the app and how to use it. We aren’t interested in renting the app… basically we’re holding out on that machine, but sooner or later it’s going to become a security risk in our network.

Couldn't you run it in a VM?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#90
post #80
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…

100%. That the author think it's "backwards" that they can't run a sustainable business by copying what's already been made but need to put in some actual work (and that building profitable software inherently must involves AI/ML experts and cloud specialist) speaks more about OPs bias than about actual requirements. Not meaning to point fingers at them specifically too much; they're most likely in a bubble where these views are implicitly assumed.

As for the specific example of Photoshop, well, yeah.. Adobe has put in at least that much work and resources behind it, so what do you expect is required to get a fair fight? Photoshop was an incredibly complex and refined piece of software with immense work behind it before they moved to the cloud. 99% you wouldn't pull that off in 2008 either. That GIMP is still mostly unheard of outside of enthusiast circles and never posed any threat to Adobe shows that it takes way more than a handful of skilled devs.

> Copies of grep

https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep started in 2016 and went stable in 2019. It's not being sold as a SaaS subscription because why would it?

I often hear complaints about entitled users but I get some "entitled tech founder" vibes here, as if not being able to sustain on rent-seeking behavior is a defect.

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