Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Time Till Open Source Alternative

staltz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 340 posts

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#121

Post by nine_k »

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…

Presence of an alternative ≠ the alternative replacing the incumbent.

Linux has not completely replaced Windows or macOS, it even has not replaced FreeBSD. But having it as an alternative, even back in 1990s when it was not yet mature, was very important.

Firefox has not replaced MSIE or Chrome, but its presence is very, very important for the entire Web, to my mind.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#122

Post by pjmlp »

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.

Blender was a commercial product, whose main users kept supporting after it went open source.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#123

Post by joshmanders »

pjmlp wrote: post #114
rr808 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> de-facto market-leader, they are mostly infrastructure Maybe its technical users? Even linux is used by IT pros rather than regular people. I think tech people just dont like paying for anything.

Those of us that realise our salaries must come out from somewhere, do like paying others for the work we profit from.

I think the correlation of people who don't like paying for things and engineers are because most engineers are people who learned computers at a young age and found piracy, etc as their goto way to learn things because I know I couldn't afford Macromedia Dreamweaver when I was a kid, but I used it...

So now most think "why would I pay when I can pirate or use an alternative that is a pain to setup but once you get over that initial pain, it's smooth sailing" whereas others are like "I don't have time nor desire to do that, just take my $10/mo"

I personally stopped pirating and started paying for stuff for the same reasons you stated, and also because I felt like a hypocrite expecting people to pay me for my work, when I wouldn't pay others for their work.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#124

Post by foobiekr »

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…

Yes. Affinity Photo and Design most likely.

GIMP is just awful. It's worse than any of the commercial Mac paint programs including Pixelmator, acorn, etc.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#125

Post by johnfn »

cowtools wrote: post #117
johnfn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I couldn't disagree more strongly! Programming is like building a house on shifting sand. How many projects that you haven't touched in the last 5 years still run? If you're anything like me, the percentage is vanishingly small - and my old projects aren't even that complicated. If you find that this is a belief "common in forums like HN with lots of programmers", I suspect that's because engineers are the most…

>I mean, just look at HN for examples. Quite literally yesterday it happened again: Heroku decided to turn off all old free apps. That's a whole bunch of my old apps that are about to deprecate and break unless I do some work on them. Yeah, pretty short-sighted of you to go out of your way to design those systems in a way that is dependent on a single company hosting it. >I suppose you could argue that some apps are…

> Yeah, pretty short-sighted of you to go out of your way to design those systems in a way that is dependent on a single company hosting it.

I don't think we can have a productive conversation if you make statements like these.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#126

Post by onionisafruit »

ethbr0 wrote: post #34
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…

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…

I never considered this differentiator before, but it makes sense.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#127

Post by donio » 

  Netscape Navigator -> Mosaic: -692 days
  Slack -> IRC: -9102 days
Yeah, I know that there are obvious feature differences but the list also has entries like BitKeeper -> Git and ManyCam -> OBS which are just as skewed.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#128

Post by AlbertCory »

I was just talking to another ex-Googler today, and he has a simple explanation for why products keep getting worse (especially Google's, but not just them):

PMs gotta get promoted

New PM inherits a successful product. They can't get promoted if all they do is keep it healthy and growing. No, they have to make a radical change, even if the product doesn't need it, and in fact their radical change makes it worse.

I could present examples of "fixing what isn't broken" but it would probably just be a dive into the deep end.

In any case, though, Mr. Staltz is wrong. Making a product usable is an art, and OSS projects very seldom have it. There is no one (a PM, oddly enough) to say "no, your new feature is stupid and doesn't fit with the rest of the product."

As other people have noted, this applies mainly to user-facing products. The developers do an 80% job and then split, and no one wants to do the shit work that comprises the other 20%.

This is not to defend stupid, greedy companies like Adobe, by the way. But yes, GIMP does suck, as many people have pointed out.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#129

Post by hilbert42 »

unknownaccount wrote: post #103
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…

GIMP is supposed to be a Photoshop alternative? But is missing so many features which don’t even seem that hard to code? I always thought it was supposed to be some weird middle ground between Paint and Photoshop.

For years, I've looked to GIMP as an alternative to Photoshop but now I've given up the idea. Yes, it's missing many features but my main reason for dropping it is its perverse operation, it's just too awkward and clumsy to use.

I can only conclude the reason that these inherent problems with GIMP have remained uncorrected for so long is that its developers couldn't give a damn whether we use it or not.

It seems only a play toy for its cliquey developers and the only reason it's available at all is that we gullible users act as occasional bug detectors.

Sure, open software has resoure problems hence expected delays but too much water has flowed under the bridge for that now to be a viable excuse.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#130

Post by pjmlp »

musicale wrote: post #83
gregmac wrote: 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.

Because users actually pay for games.
Post reply on HN