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Time Till Open Source Alternative

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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#151

Post by galaxyLogic »

osigurdson wrote: post #115
hiptobecubic wrote: post #70

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.

It feels like someone with great ideas started working on Gmail and quit before it was finished. Whatever they are doing to organize emails in a "smart" way is super confusing. I kind of get it but it just doesn't work. They should either finish it or just revert back to organizing emails by date of arrival.

I was trying to find sent mail and only way I found it was by searching mail where I was the sender.

Smart but not obvious.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#152

Post by bruce511 »

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…

I completely agree. We operate in a space where we rent out our proprietary software to businesses to solve a mundane business requirement. We wrote our own software.

We compete with other companies, some have their own (or some exclusivity) others make use of a generic package (closed source, but they supply anyone who wants to be in this space.)

Yes, having unique software means we can do things others can't. But really we're selling "the whole package" of which the software is only a tiny part. Mostly our customers are paying for service, support, statutory updates and so on. They are paying us to be around when they need us. That may be tomorrow, or 10 years from now, but our existence ultimately matters to them.

Maybe one day there will be viable OSS in our space, it may already exist. But if it does, no-one here is selling it, or supporting it. If someone does make it we, and any number of our existing compeditors, can happily pivot to it, with our existing sales and support infrastructure.

It turns out that having a unique product helps our sales process. We can differentiate on more than just price. But ultimately customers want support not source code.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#153

Post by cryptonector »

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…

Infrastructure has a bit of a tragedy of the commons thing going on. No one wants to pay for everyone else's infrastructure.

So any software project that is infrastructure tends to suffer from lack of funding, whether it be proprietary software or open source.

There are exceptions, naturally. E.g., PostgreSQL and SQLite, and Linux. To overcome the tragedy of the commons you need tons of interest and community. Everyone who contributes has to feel like they're getting their money's worth and that there's no better way. I.e., mindshare matters. Mindshare matters whether the thing is open source or proprietary.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#154

Post by zaroth »

I’m confused…

There are no rows in the table for proprietary software that hasn’t been OSA’d, and the rows that are there take no head of market size or adoption rates of the alternative.

Therefore the chart can only possibly trend downwards because the X axis is a date from the past until ‘today’ and the y axis is the number of days since that date that something pretty arbitrary happened.

Think of the X axis as “Days Since 1970” (0 - ~11,500). The maximum Y value is bounded by y = 11,500 - x.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#155

Post by nequo »

hilbert42 wrote: post #129
unknownaccount wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What did you drop it in favor of?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#156

Post by indus »

Whoever the eff wrote this is an effing genius. I have been thinking about this for sometime how majority of the saas businesses will be taken over by oss. Saw this first hand in server software. But the analysis done and the tabulated view and chart blew my mind.

Very well articulated.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#157

Post by singhrac »

osigurdson wrote: post #115
hiptobecubic wrote: post #70

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.

It feels like someone with great ideas started working on Gmail and quit before it was finished. Whatever they are doing to organize emails in a "smart" way is super confusing. I kind of get it but it just doesn't work. They should either finish it or just revert back to organizing emails by date of arrival.

Gmail quality dropped off a cliff all of a sudden. In particular, many many emails get sent to spam now, including emails sent by Google itself! Notifications about calendar invites regularly get sent to spam at inconvenient times.

I can't tell if this is just some sort of temporary spam filter tweaking error and oversight or an emergent property of a content-based filtering system that they won't revert.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#158

Post by bruce511 »

latchkey wrote: post #147
bruce511 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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, n…

> Google is the Pinto of SaaS That's some strong personal opinion... source? GCP has been extremely performant and reliable for me across several different companies. I'm not saying that people have definitely run into issues, which we've all read about here on HN, but this sounds more like squeaky wheel than the norm. > Thanks to their "no support" policy, Their support has been excellent, when I've needed it, which…

>> That's some strong personal opinion... source?

It's absolutely personal perception. Ford made a couple millions Pintos, I never had one, much less saw one explode in a fireball, but I'm not rushing out to buy one either.

My perception is borne from a long history of reading stories here. Over time they create a perception in me that Google regularly drops products, changes APIs, changes pricing, closes accounts, withholds earnings and so on.

I'm sure millions of people happily use their services. However my perception of risk with Google is high, so as a result I don't use any (paid) Google services and I take my business elsewhere. Obviously I use Google search, and watch YouTube, but I'm happy to not put Google in my supply-chain, nor rely on them for revenue.

Now maybe it's just bad PR. Maybe Google has real lower risk than say someone else. Maybe Pintos were statistically safer than a Volvo. But perception is everything, and my perception is that, given a choice, I'm not going to use GCP.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#159

Post by trog »

threatofrain wrote: post #76
hiptobecubic wrote: post #70

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?

For me it's partially because the interface is insanely slow and painful to use. Maybe this is a "I'm in Australia" problem but it feels like I'm wading through mud to perform the most basic tasks.
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