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Time Till Open Source Alternative

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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#181

Post by samstave »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #70
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…

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.

Dont forget Goog literally owened the anti spam industry with gmail after their integrating POSTINI purchase in like ~~2006

And now in 2022 any gmailinbox is fn full of spam...

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#182

Post by seanhunter »

latchkey wrote: post #92
lokar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

This "well over a decade" claim needs some qualification. GCP only became gevnerally available in Nov 2011. Before that, there was App Engine and Cloud Storage, but not GCP.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#183

Post by seanhunter »

travisjungroth wrote: post #62
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…

I have this hunch you could break into product management by product managing open source projects. You'd certainly learn some good skills if you could do it. It would be pure influence over authority.

I'd be somewhat skeptical of anyone trying to product manage an open source project, and I think unless you were a truly exceptional product manager, most contributors would perceive your contribution as net negative if you tried that. The point of open source is people work on the things they want to work on (for the most part, obvious exceptions apply) and via a Darwinian process, what survives is the result of the best ideas of the people who stick it out.

Open source contributions I've made have been mostly because I need a certain feature or there's something that doesn't quite work right etc. Eg recently I took up qubes os. I like using the i3 window manager, and it had some problems on qubes, so I made some small contribution (I can't even remember what it was now) to fix that.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#184

Post by hilbert42 »

nequo wrote: post #155
hilbert42 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Paint.NET, Inkscape, Krita, CinePaint, ImageMagick (command line - yes, it can be very useful at times), and various others when certain needs dictate.

Also, Photoshop CS3 which is my last paid version (moreover, I can still reinstall it as Adobe temporarily released a general version with an unlocked key when it abolished the CS3 licensing server some years ago).

I even use IrfanView viewer as it has a nice batch converter (although it's no good for 48-bit work).

Frankly, there's no shortage of image editors even after eliminating GIMP and Photoshop.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#185

Post by bambax »

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.

> just revert back to organizing emails by date of arrival

You can choose to do that: Settings / General / Conversation view off

It's so much better to simply have emails in the order they arrive instead of hunting them down in "conversations".

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#186

Post by zzo38computer »

Even if all software is open-source (which I doubt), that does not mean that nobody can earn money from it; there are still ways to earn money, too.

Others:

MS-DOS / PC-DOS -- FreeDOS

ZZT -- ZZT (the source code was rewritten to produce the same executable file; the original source code was not made available)

MESH:Hero Hearts -- Free Hero Mesh

Windows NT -- ReactOS

BTRON -- B-Free (incomplete and seems to be abandoned?)

(And, the above are definitely not all)

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#187

Post by la_fayette »

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…

This sometimes might be true, but there are many counterexamples. If you look at the web content management systems, the market is dominated by well-engineered open source CMS products, e.g., Drupal, ez Publish, typo3... Even for webshops this true: presta shop, opencart, ...

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#188

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

rr808 wrote: post #98
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…

> 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.

Yet we happily buy Macs and IntelliJ licenses and pay for alternatives to Gmail.

Linux, is quite frankly the best dev environment you can get. MacOS is a nice compromise if you need some commercial software too. At least it’s still a Unix.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#189

Post by Animats »

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…

Yes. Open source software people very rarely do good graphical user interfaces. Unclear why this is so. But it is.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#190

Post by BiteCode_dev »

la_fayette wrote: post #187
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…

This sometimes might be true, but there are many counterexamples. If you look at the web content management systems, the market is dominated by well-engineered open source CMS products, e.g., Drupal, ez Publish, typo3... Even for webshops this true: presta shop, opencart, ...

Firefox, VLC, Signal, chromium, codium, veracrypt, ublock origin, bitwarden, ubuntu...
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