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Time Till Open Source Alternative

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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#211

Post by fsloth »

Axsuul wrote: post #44

Lots of wrong assumptions here but the most egregious of them all: > If your closed software demands $1000 from my pocket but I can make do with a free and open source alternative, I will choose the open one. Sorry but software purchasing decisions aren't simply based on cost and never will.

Indeed! Especially big corps seem to prefer software with clear licensing terms and a capability to license software for organization at scale. In that competition the software with better licensing options win, not the cheaper one necessarily.

And the cheaper software is cheaper only if you apply no cost to retraining, taking the product in use in your existing production pipeline and so on.

This writing is not very well put together and ignores several facets of large corporations.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#212

Post by fsloth »

ofrzeta wrote: post #18

Open Cascade is not an (open source) alternative to AutoCAD. Also there is none. (people talk about OpenSCAD and FreeCAD but neither of them are comparable to AutoCAD).

Yes, this comparison is extremely weird. The author did not really do his homework. It's like saying libpng is a replacement for Photoshop.

To clarify: Autocad is a CAD suite used for 2D and 3D drawing production. In addition to that, it is used as an implementation platform for a large number of third party domain specific software for engineering disciplines that need more intelligence on top of the basic Autocad - HVAC planning, civil construction and so on.

OpenCascade is a geometry modeling kernel - a c++ library with no "end user" gui functionality or database. Yes, such a thing is a critical part in a software like Autocad, but only one small part.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#213

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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'd argue, and think GIMP is a good example, that products can fight off open source alternative adoption by being free to certain groups.

Piracy, student discounts, shareware, limited trials.

You could still consider this a win for open source, as it stops market abuse and restricts those paying to the people who depend on the software for business reasons and who haven't had their trust sufficiently broken that they switch over to open source to prevent abuse (which is the story in infrastructure, you're basically a sharecropper if you're building on non-open source infra).

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#214

Post by klabb3 »

astrange wrote: post #196
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Signal and chromium as well. I am not sure about Ubuntu, but to me it looks like they have a product/design org.

Blender would be another example. How are they run?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#215

Post by la_fayette »

nickelpro wrote: post #195
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, ...

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

I consider the content editors as end users of a CMS. The website visitor is not using the CMS.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#216

Post by v3ss0n »

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.

Paul Buchheit was core developer of gmail , who left gmail in 2006 - where its become shitty afterwards. He founded friendfeed and then got acquired by Facebook - and he left facebook to become angel investor / he is also main Partner of YC . he invested in many great startups like Twitch . On the opensource part , he build tornado web framework which is really important async framework for python ecosystem. Jupyter is built on top of tornado . He is active in HackerNews .

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#217

Post by flohofwoe »

klabb3 wrote: post #214
astrange wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Signal and chromium as well. I am not sure about Ubuntu, but to me it looks like they have a product/design org. Blender would be another example. How are they run?

Blender is a foundation:

https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#218

Post by Ygg2 »

pjmlp wrote: post #122
Ygg2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well on one hand OSS did make Blender which is moving towards a defacto standard in game making at least. Otoh nothing prohibits another OSS software appearing and stealing an OSS incumbent's thunder. See Krita and Gimp.

Blender was a commercial product, whose main users kept supporting after it went open source.

And early Blender sucked ass compared to today. While it starting as a commercial product might have helped at start, right now it's no longer the case.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#219

Post by bjornsing »

I can’t help feeling like we engineers are shooting ourselves in the foot with the open source culture: Most challenging and interesting work is turning into unpaid (open source) hobby projects. Professional software engineering is more and more about cobbling together various open source software, fiddling with configuration files and other menial tasks. Also, where is my “open source lawyer” or “open source doctor” whose work I can download from GitHub for free and file my issues / complaints with there?

I guess this benefits the mediocre software engineer (who can now accomplish things by cobbling together open source that they would never be able to accomplish from scratch), and perhaps it’s also a plus for the top 0.001% who are good hustlers too and can make a career out of touring around conferences as some kind of nerd celebrities. But for the skilled and professional engineer (say top 5-25%) I’m starting to feel it’s a trap.

(Open source is great for basic infrastructure though, like operating systems, compilers, interpreters, frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch, etc. I’m definitely not against it in general.)

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#220

Post by dotancohen »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #213
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'd argue, and think GIMP is a good example, that products can fight off open source alternative adoption by being free to certain groups. Piracy, student discounts, shareware, limited trials. You could still consider this a win for open source, as it stops market abuse and restricts those paying to the people who depend on the software for business reasons and who haven't had their trust sufficiently broken that the…

That is not a win for open source because reducing payments is not a goal of open source. Assured continuation of availability and ownership of user's data is the explicit goal of the FOSS movement as stated by RMS. That means that it will continue to run on your hardware, and won't lock your data, and you can fix the bugs and suit it to your purpose.

Money was never the issue.

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