Time Till Open Source Alternative • Hacker News Board

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#221

Post by ZeroGravitas » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 9:17 AM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #220

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

RMS is on record as supporting BSD style licences for certain things because without them, proprietary software would have an even stronger stranglehold.

https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3

So it's not totally black and white, there's tactics and strategy involved. The less money going to Adobe, the less power and control they have. If they can force you to pay, they can force you to do other things. If they can't force you to pay, then they can't force other things as well.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#222

Post by opan » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 9:22 AM UTC

netmonk wrote: post #209

Why would it be wrong to earn money selling software ? Or why is it good that you earn less and less money for writing and publishing software ? I don’t get it. Working for free is the new normal ?

It's perhaps wrong because there is no limit on supply, infinite copies can be made. To charge for such a thing doesn't reflect the cost to make or acquire the software.

However, usually people are talking about free as in freedom, and cost is simply irrelevant. There's proprietary freeware as well as free software that is sold. It's about what rights the copyright holder grants the users via a license. You can sell your friend a CD with Emacs on it for $5. It is not forbidden.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#223

Post by newbieuser » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 9:39 AM UTC

I don't understand what you want to explain in the monetization part. For example, things like hasura, supabase are open source. but they can make money by selling their own services. and there are other examples like this. I think the author's point of view is too romantic

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#224

Post by kybernetyk » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 9:41 AM UTC

Many of those alternatives aren't really an alternative a professional would use.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#225

Post by aothms » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 9:43 AM UTC

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).

True. Came here to say that. QCAD is somewhat of an alternative to AutoCAD. OpenCASCADE is a foss alternative to e.g ACIS or Parasolid.

It's potentially important as there aren't that many projects from the 80s in the list, so maybe has an impact on the trend line.

(a trend line that would look similar if you look at time between proprietary alternatives I guess... a fact of the increasing amount of time spent on software engineering?)

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#226

Post by heisenbit » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 9:45 AM UTC

The analysis has a gap when it comes to products vs. solutions. A lot of problems these days are not solved by a big product but by integrating smaller often open source building blocks. Solutions that preempt products (or are never turned into products). The products of old and the market they lived in were different. It is not just that open source grew with respect to capabilities - the other side shrank too.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#227

Post by antaviana » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 9:48 AM UTC

seanhunter wrote: post #182

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.

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.

Do you mean they should have said instead "within 9 months after GCP became generally available" to be more precise in their statement?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#228

Post by marginalia_nu » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 9:48 AM UTC

Closi wrote: post #206

ThalesX wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being such succesful products, all of these taken together probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad business...

> Being such succesful products, all of these taken together probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad business... Assuming this post is sarcasm, Are we really going to criticise Google Search for not being profitable? Google has an ad business because of these products, not seperate to them.

Google doesn't have an ad-business, it is an ad-business.

You can't separate Google from its ad business. All of their major products exist in service of the ad business, search, inbox, even Chrome. If the services don't exist to help build a profile of you, they exist to help build a profile of web traffic and detect ad-fraud, or to simply shape the landscape into one that isn't hostile to google's ads.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#229

Post by johnywalks » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 9:56 AM UTC

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…

> open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure

Infrastructure you can trust. Most close sourced tech will lock you in and you're at their mercy - no thanks.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#230

Post by npteljes » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 10:01 AM UTC

>Open source is coming for your business. It is just a matter of time before there exists a compelling open source alternative to your software.

Are we really taking this seriously in the booming world of proprietary software / SAAS culture? Come on.

"All software will be open source, and no one will make money with software."

What a load of bullshit. First of all, humanity would be nicely off to have a set of open source resources that are at least usable to participate in society. And we've not reached this point, yet.

Second, what about OTHER proprietary alternatives? It's not like closed source is a fun club where they all respect each other's hard work and only original ideas boom. Somehow after the success of Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and others become very popular. And no matter how many Syncthings and Open/Nextclouds there are, they still make a good amount of money - even Dropbox still exists.

This article is just a hit piece against FOSS.