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

191–200 of 340 posts

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#191

Post by bambax »

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…

> If you want to make an actual alternative to Photoshop you'll need thousands of workers spread over a lot of skill sets. You need cloud technology specialists, AI/ML experts, R&D, design experts to do real studies and interviews with users, etc.

Photopea is a feature-complete online image editor. It's widely successful. It's not open source, but it's the work of just one guy.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#192

Post by astrange »

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’ve been getting lots of extra spam and it particularly seems like anything with “invoice” in the text won’t get sent to spam.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#193

Post by butterNaN »

sidlls wrote: post #5

Only 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…

It is impossible to be without ideology. Even if you think you're free from it, you just subscribe to the 'default' ideology of your environments.

Meeting market demands _is_ an ideology.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#194

Post by nickelpro »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #190
la_fayette wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

None of these are counter-examples to what the OP said

> Not all, but the ones that aren't have clear product management of some sort.

That's effectively all of these except maybe ublock.

If you don't have someone trying to sell some portion of your code base, true community efforts not a commercial effort that happens to be OSS, you're probably an infrastructure project.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#195

Post by nickelpro »

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, ...

A CMS is infrastructure, it's business facing not user facing

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#196

Post by astrange »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #190
la_fayette wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Firefox is made by a company. VLC has a product manager (who owns the VideoLAN Foundation).

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#197

Post by MaxBarraclough »

hilbert42 wrote: post #164
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…

I use mainly open source software so I don't use pirated stuff in any of my operational systems as it poses too many problems. So too is licensed commercial software as Adobe's Photoshop licensing scam shows. One of my most annoying examples is UltraEdit a text and code editor originally from IDM Computer Solutions, now Idera, Inc. Years ago I bought a perpetual upgrade license which at the time was quite expensive w…

> If one didn't uninstall UltraEdit correctly the IDM website deemed it to still be installed.

In my experience with this kind of DRM, an email is generally enough to get them to reset the licence at their end. Still an inconvenience though, and you'll need to wait until they've done it.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#198

Post by cal85 »

singhrac wrote: post #157
osigurdson wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#199

Post by medoc »

Animats wrote: post #189
ethbr0 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For making a good GUI, the tech guys need to be ordered around by non-tech guys who think like, or talk to, regular users and know what is needed. Tech guys don't like this, so someone needs to pay for their suffering.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#200

Post by ngrilly »

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.

You’re cherry-picking examples. Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and Chrome are extraordinarily successful products.
Post reply on HN