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

261–270 of 340 posts

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#261

Post by troad »

mid-kid wrote: post #252
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 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 pr…

I appreciate your thoughts. I do suspect that I speak for the majority of artists and designers on this one, based on the conversations I've had with them on this and the very low popularity of GIMP in those worlds. (I'm coming from a game dev angle, for context, so I interact with artists fairly regularly. I'm also married to one!) But I certainly appreciate that GIMP may be useful for you, and I wouldn't wish to deny you use of that tool.

I love Krita; it's my graphics suite of choice for many tasks. But I can't help but think that if GIMP hadn't been so resistant to input from artists and designers, Krita wouldn't need to exist at all. It is a tool born of the lucky fact that someone wasn't satisfied with GIMP and had the technical skills to do something about it.

With respect to your comment about innovation, I'd be more inclined to agree if, y'know, GIMP had actually done any of that. GIMP is not innovative, nor competitive, and is unable to facilitate even fairly basic tasks for contemporary artists and designers like working with CMYK images. The existence of "good-enough" GIMP is a hindrance to innovation in this space.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#262

Post by matijsvzuijlen »

rozab wrote: post #260
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…

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

Wasn't that Perforce?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#263

Post by isaacremuant »

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'd argue that LibreOffice, Inkscape, 7zip, Firefox, FileZilla, OBS, bitwarden are also well known, well used and compelling.

Hell, OBS is arguably better than anything out there. There's also Blender.

I think your bias is too strong. It's not so much controversial as misguided. People do things to meet their own needs and pain points and then products evolve. Having paid people behind products would make you think a product will be better but it's not necessarily the case. Also, different products might be better at different things (Firefox, despite some backsteps, is still more customizable than the closed source alternatives).

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#264

Post by ajb »

matijsvzuijlen wrote: post #262
rozab wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wasn't that Perforce?

No, it was bitkeeper: https://lwn.net/Articles/131657/

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#265

Post by realityking »

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, ...

There‘s a large proprietary CMS market, mostly Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, EpiServer/Optimizely. There‘s also the more recently risen headless/SaaS content platforms such as Contentful, Sanity, Contentstack, etc. At the bottom end of the market you got Webflow, Wix, and Squarespace.

Wordpress and Drupal do compete but the market is not dominated by open source if you look at more than just the count of websites.

Similar things are true in commerce. Salesforce Commerce, SAP Commerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and commercetools are all not open source but very sizable businesses.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#266

Post by sbuk »

klabb3 wrote: post #244
flohofwoe wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender is a foundation: https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/

Interesting. So all of the examples have salaried design and product folks? Meanwhile there's thousands of volunteering FOSS projects that are engineers only. Do product & design people not have passion projects? Or they do but are for some reason unable to collaborate with engineers (or vice versa)?

It's a complex problem. Design agencies and individual designers are blighted by the spectre of "spec work" [https://www.nospec.com] [https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1]. The tl;dr of it is that business will approach agencies and demand they work on a product for free, of a a cost lower than the wok is worth in an act of good faith for the promise of fully paid work in the future. Except the work rarely comes. The upshot is designers are taught the value of their worth at college/university.

The other problem is the FOSS community itself. See the concurrent post about GIMP [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32624055]. Opinionated devs that either don't see the value of design or having a designer. I know that this isn't true for all projects, but there a bad apples amongst the bigger, more well known projects (GNOME for example) that will spoil it for everyone else. Again, GIMP is a great example of this. As a result, most 'passion projects' lead to designers working on small projects that inspire them, which are rarely software related, ore they look to create something that can provide an income, either as a small second income or as a new business.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#267

Post by pjmlp »

Ygg2 wrote: post #218
pjmlp wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because the commercial partners cared enough to keep putting the money to further develop it.

Blender always had a professional userbase around it, unlike the Photoshop wannabe competition.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#268

Post by wowokay »

mid-kid wrote: post #252
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 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 pr…

Your second sentence doesn’t make sense because their post presented a lot of good points that move the argument past a “I don’t like it so it’s bad” argument. To knock it up another notch those same points could be applied to Linux over Windows. Market (user) adoption is the only real metric to measure against. The argument I submit is that a tool like Gimp can’t be considered better if it can’t claim the market to prove it, if it was fundamentally better at its core adoption would pass the non open source leader.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#269

Post by ghaff »

KineticArms wrote: post #253
lrvick wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>an adequate facsimile of Photoshop

For some it apparently is. There are certainly talented designers/artists who really want an open source stack who can produce excellent results using GIMP. Would I encourage using GIMP if someone doesn't care about open source? Almost certainly not, but it can be used to produce excellent results.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#270

Post by einpoklum »

> It is just a matter of time before there exists a compelling open source alternative to your software

The word "just" doesn't fit that sentence. Most commercial companies offer products and services for which it's "just" a matter of time before they become obsolete, irrelevant or unavailable. This may be due to technological reasons (propeller passenger aircraft which gave way to jets, sailing ships which gave way to steamers etc.) or social reasons (e.g. rigid-structured wide dresses - or for that matter, last year's fashion lines).

I believe in Open-Source - and Libre-licensed - software. But that argument is rather weak.

Also - it seems to me like most software which runs "closed-source" hardware - be it cars, household electric appliances, etc. is likely to stay closed, since such hardware is developed and released routinely so there is always a reverse-engineering challenge before that can be opened up. And usually, there are not enough people with enough interest to reverse-engineer "all the things".

Post reply on HN