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Time Till Open Source Alternative

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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#171

Post by pronlover723 »

joshmanders wrote: post #123
pjmlp wrote: post #114

Earlier 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…

I think it comes from being young with no disposable income and carrying that idea for too long. The older I get the more I pay. I have the money, I value my time, I value other people's time, I try to pay them one way or another.

I paid for Sublime Merge when I could have used one of the 10 other free git front ends. I can't say there is any particular feature I use that are not available in the other front ends.

I've been paying $299 up front and $120 a year for a text editor since the 90s and I rarely use it anymore (I use VSCode more) but I still find I go back to it once in a while and while $120 a year might sound like a lot it's less than I'm being paid by the hour so I can spend hours or days searching for alternatives or I can just pay the $120 and keep using the solution I know. I donate to several open source projects monthly and have given $50 or $100 here or there to others.

At the same time, I have to really get a ton of value out of the project. Blender, Kodi, a few large libraries that would take me months to repo I'm happy to donate. People making a 1k-5k line project and asking for funding though kind of seem like bad faith actors. It's like they're ignoring the tons of stuff they get for free and instead of giving back they're being miserly. It'd be like going to a potluck party, everyone brings something for free but one person brings beers and asks $2 per can while at the same time eating from all the free food.

People complain about corps using open source and not paying but I personally don't see it that way. Most tech corps give back in one way or another. Apple gives Clang, LLVM, JSC, WebKit... Google gives Chromium, Go, Dart, Flutter, Core Android, Skia, ... Facebook gives React, React-Native, PyTorch, ... Microsoft gives .NET, C#, F#, VSCode, Electron, Github (free hosting and free CI for open source), and even in if some corp, GM? uses open source I'm sure they give back to society in some way. There are few companies that are all take and no give.

Maybe another way to frame it, I see lots of open source as similar to volunteering. If go volunteer to clean up a park I don't get angry that lots of people come use the park without also volunteering to clean up. Sure, if my volunteering becomes a burden that makes too many demands of my time then I'm either going to stop or it's going to have to become a job but the fact that that threshold exists doesn't mean things below that threshold need to stop existing.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#172

Post by butterNaN »

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 switched to basic HTML gmail the moment it tried to predict what I wanted to type (often incorrectly, which worsened my experience)

I sometimes accidentally open the 'modern' view and it feels so bloated. Everything is so against intuition, it feels like someone's fresh-out-of-marketing-school design.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#173

Post by lrem »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #169
singhrac wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Funny, I have the opposite problem, which could actually explain your problem. I never used to get spam through GMail's filters, but in the last six-ish months I now get a couple every day. They're almost always the same format, too - frequently just a link, and often coming from an outlook.com email address. So a possible hypothesis is that spammers got good at evading GMail's filter, so in tweaking it to catch thes…

Funny, I have neither. But think your analysis makes sense too and I just got lucky.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#174

Post by butterNaN »

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 switched to basic HTML gmail the moment it tried to predict what I wanted to type (incorrectly, I should add).

I sometimes accidentally open the 'modern' view and it feels so bloated. Everything is so against intuition, it feels like someone's fresh-out-of-marketing-school design.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#175

Post by enos_feedler »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #169
singhrac wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Funny, I have the opposite problem, which could actually explain your problem. I never used to get spam through GMail's filters, but in the last six-ish months I now get a couple every day. They're almost always the same format, too - frequently just a link, and often coming from an outlook.com email address. So a possible hypothesis is that spammers got good at evading GMail's filter, so in tweaking it to catch thes…

I have observed the same thing. I _never_ saw a single spam message in years. Suddenly I am seeing strikingly obvious ones at the same frequency you are. This must be on Google's plate to fix. Surely they see it.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#176

Post by JodieBenitez »

> In the future – and maybe it’ll take a couple more decades – all software will be open source, and no one will make money with software. And I think that’s a good thing.

Ignoring open source "alternatives" with UX so poor I'm still glad to pay for the proprietary thing. Ignoring all the web-based stuff for which a large part of the code is behind a closed source API.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#177

Post by lrem »

jedberg wrote: post #161
latchkey wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? This comment seems absurd, at best. I am no 'google engineer' (is that supposed to be a bad thing?) and I've been using and loving GCP for well over a decade. Built several extremely successful businesses on it.

What they're saying is that Google is opinionated. They determine that their way is the right way and you will do it their way. As opposed to Microsoft and Amazon, who both ask their customers, "how do you want to solve this problem?" and then build what the customers want. If the way Google has decided you should build something happens to work for you, great, but for most people, they want a product built around ho…

I work in Google and think I can share: in fact we do ask our users a lot. To the point that I would be very surprised if any major development in GCP is allowed at all without extensive focus groups, or coming out of cooperation with some major customer.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#178

Post by pjmlp »

ksec wrote: post #146
joshmanders wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is why I think most software should have an educational license that allow students to freely use their product. I mean even Steve Jobs said it on stage, no one pays for Adobe Photoshop in college. LOL

Most relevant software does have such licenses, that is how I used to buy Borland software.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#179

Post by jongjong »

It's an interesting article but I'm not sure that the conclusion is correct. The existence of a similar or superior open source solution does not guarantee that a proprietary solution will lose most of its users to that open source alternative; especially if there are network effects at play.

Also, when it comes to B2B solutions, network effects have a massive effect on the procurement process. The people who decide what software a large company should buy/use are more likely to buy from their friends' companies (or they might get some kind of kickback payment or job offer down the line)... So there is no incentive for insiders to use the free solution no matter how good it is.

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