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

251–260 of 340 posts

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#251

Post by lstodd »

samstave wrote: post #181
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.

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...

Because you have to support products, esp. antispam, while goog is generaly known for doing the other thing.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#252

Post by mid-kid »

troad wrote: post #237
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…

I respectfully disagree; I think GIMP is a great example of an open source alternative that is both markedly worse than the corresponding commercial product, and yet good enough to inhibit the creation of new open source projects that would otherwise jeopardise the market share of that commercial product. If I were an engineer at Adobe, and I was asked to make an open source project that would in no way endanger Phot…

I wholeheartedly disagree with the sentiment in your comment. Just because you, or a certain group of people don't like it, doesn't mean it's a bad tool. It may not serve for everyone, but for those for which it does, it works, and it does so well. Also, acting like photoshop is the be-all end-all of photo editing pushes the idea that you must be just like photoshop to even compete, which is actively harmful as it prevents people from innovating, and puts pressure on anyone thinking of even attempting such a daunting task.

Furthermore, even if I were to agree, your argument completely falls apart with the existence of Krita. Writing software like this is hard and time-consuming, which is the primary reason we haven't seen more projects of this scale, as there's been various smaller-scale tools over the years, like Pinta.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#253

Post by KineticArms »

lrvick wrote: post #239
troad wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree; I think GIMP is a great example of an open source alternative that is both markedly worse than the corresponding commercial product, and yet good enough to inhibit the creation of new open source projects that would otherwise jeopardise the market share of that commercial product. If I were an engineer at Adobe, and I was asked to make an open source project that would in no way endanger Phot…

I used Photoshop for 8 years, including for web development, before switching to Gimp. Gimp is good enough for everything one needs in web dev, is free, and has a vital feature Photoshop lacks: the ability to run on a Linux workstation. When developing software intended for Linux servers the value of having a Linux workstation to easily do local development cannot be understated.

Photoshop runs fine on Linux. I pay for it and use it in Wine. Gimp is hot trash and to add insult to injury it's responsible for birthing Gtk; it's a fool me once fool me twice thing.

What is this mutually shared meme-delusion that Gimp is anywhere close to an adequate facsimile of Photoshop?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#254

Post by lstodd »

rapnie wrote: post #162
nine_k wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They require different approaches. The best way to herd cats is by a laser pointer: show a clear, shining goal, and you don't need to give more directions. With sheep, you need to run circles around them and so drive their formidable grass-cutting capacity where you want it to be, slowly.

Nice analogy. I like that. For the laser you likely need to show an indicator for the distance to the bright red spot, and break it into measurable chunks (like a roadmap) to which actionable steps can be attached. Tbh a cat won't do anything with that, but to the feline breed of FOSS developers it may help to keep (and understand the importance of) product focus. Although you might just focus the bright spot on fart…

Like JC said - you can shove your roadmaps where you like, many people contribute exactly because they're sick of roadmaps and product foci.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#255

Post by latexr »

ngrilly wrote: post #200
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.

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

Depending on one’s point, it can be argued that listing Google’s successful products is the cherry-picking: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#256

Post by fnord123 »

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…

You have a good point that we can start a discussion around but I think you're being overly negative and falling for survivor bias. E.g. Does the success of Photoshop mean proprietary product management is superior? Or does the death of Corel Draw mean it's doomed to failure? And Apple, everyone's favourite product company, has Pages and Numbers which are not better than OO (and Word's incumbency is vaguely illegal).

So let's put that, and FOSS dominance in browsers and IDEs and databases and programming languages and media players to the side.

FOSS could do with better product management: what would it look like? More roadmaps? More figma/inkscape mockups? More user interviews?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#258

Post by k__ »

Gigachad wrote: post #7
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…

I don't think the problem is that the development is agenda driven. It's more that the "last 10%" of work takes 99% of the effort. These alternatives look very good on a checkbox list but when you actually try to use them they just don't hold up and the work to get them there is immense. It's why almost relevant software has an army of workers behind them and more than just developers. A few devs on there own are nev…

Reminds me of an app I build.

4 screens for the main tasks

12 screens for onboarding

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#259

Post by bambax »

Gigachad wrote: post #250
bambax wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Nothing is ever feature complete, or alternatively, and image editor is feature complete when it reads my mind and spits out the perfect image without me doing any work. Anything short of that is room for improvement. Sure, there are a lot of people who don't need everything photoshop offers, but there are also a lot that do so people will continue paying for proprietary software for as long as that proprietary softw…

> Nothing is ever feature complete

Of course. I meant it's suitable for many, many purposes, which explains why it has millions of users.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#260

Post by rozab »

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…

The key example for this is BitKeeper. They signed their own death warrant by ceasing to provide free licenses to open source developers. Unfortunately, one of the projects using it was Linux. Linus was forced to write git and the rest is history
Post reply on HN