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.
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Time Till Open Source Alternative
131–140 of 340 posts
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that if at some point you had an issue with it you would've been frustrated as hell by your inability to do anything about it and would've sworn them off forever. But you were the survivor that didn't have issues and can't seem to comprehend that as a business it is absurd to rely on a company that can kill you off without reason or recourse because you were the unlucky one that pissed off the algorithm. Yo…
Shrug, seems like an inherent risk with any SaaS provider. I worked for a large porn company and a web analytics product, we were one of the largest customers of, got sold to a Mormon company. Our account was terminated. I guess I'm lucky that I haven't pissed off the GCP algo yet.
>> seems like an inherent risk with any SaaS provider.
If you see risk as binary, then yes there is risk in any SaaS provider, or indeed any part of your company supply chain. Risk though is not binary, it is measured on a scale of 0 to 1.
There is risk every time you get in a car. But some cars are safer than others. Some are renowned for putting safety first.
The vast majority of people survived their Ford Pinto, no doubt some loved it, but the perceived risk of driving it (rightly or wrongly) was higher than say a Volvo.
Google is the Pinto of SaaS. Whatever the actual risks are, they are perceived as being higher risk than other SaaS providers. Thanks to their "no support" policy, the penalty for failure is total extinction. With most SaaS businesses there are humans in the loop who can make human decisions.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#133I have yet to see open source alternative with UX that is better than original.
I'd argue in favor of Blender. While complex, it uses very strong features and gives you lots of freedom to do as you wish.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#134Having heard this kind of argument since the late 90s, I’m amused that it’s three HN links up from GIMP finally getting some CMYK support after ~25 years.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#135Only a scant handful of the open source alternatives in that table (Linux, git, gitlab, audacity, vlc media player) are compelling, if we use some measure of adoption as compelling. Most of the rest are all but unknown or so sparsely used as to be negligible compared to the software they supposedly displaced or will displace. My (probably controversial) opinion is that this is because many (most) of these alternative…
Yes, it is the hippie culture of the 70's community gardens and such applied to software, eventually everyone went to Wall Street and similar places during the 80's.
Similarly, after the FOSS wave, we are now back at models similar to shareware and demoware, because guess what, money is important.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair! Although I've never worked with a shop that was not-Oracle and migrating to Oracle. Sadly, there's the long tail of places with existing, business critical Oracle use.
Anyone that wants top tier RDMS, it nice graphical debuggers for stored procedures, integration of Java and .NET into the database, distributed transactions, raw file system accesses, web services on the DB layer, among several other features, besides Oracle, there is only MS SQL Server and the RDMS owned by IBM like DB 2 and Informix. MySQL and Postgres are kind of nice, but not really the same league at tooling lev…
This is completely in line with the premise above.
If the database is primarily a data store, unseen by the end user, then Postgress, Firebird etc are fine. If however the database is an active part of the development stack, being used by lots of "users", writing new code etc, then commercial offerings with better tooling win.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#137I 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…
Nice they have a hobby, but it is hardly the experience that using BeOS once was.
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#138Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#139Waiting for an open source GPU
Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
Exactly that.