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Time Till Open Source Alternative

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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#281

Post by School-Cotton »

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.

Richard Stallman’s personal philosophy does not define the goals of open source. There are many different people contributing to it for many different reasons, and yes, having free (as in non-paid) alternatives to proprietary software is one of the most prominent ones.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#283

Post by 082349872349872 »

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.

I suspect Dijkstra made the relevant distinction in a different context: the open source process is geared to providing correct software, not pleasant software.

> The pleasantness problem deals with the question how satisfactory a system meeting a given functional specification would be; the correctness problem deals with the question whether a given system meets that functional specification. The correctness problem being an entirely technical one, the functional specification can provide strong heuristic guidance for the system designer.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#284

Post by curious_cat_163 »

Assertion 1: "All software will be open source, " Assertion 2: "and no one will make money with software."

The data on the page only demonstrates the first assertion, at best. Even that should come with a caveat of distinction between the software itself and the business model around it that makes it sticky.

There is absolutely no reason why open source software couldn't make money.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#285

Post by tomrod »

ryukafalz wrote: post #274
KineticArms wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> What is this mutually shared meme-delusion that Gimp is anywhere close to an adequate facsimile of Photoshop? It’s not a facsimile of Photoshop but it serves the same purpose. In my experience the people who come to GIMP expecting it to work exactly like Photoshop are the ones who are disappointed, because it’s not Photoshop. But if you use it and don’t expect to already know how to use it because you know Photosho…

Precisely. "It's fine" is the problem. It doesn't need to be fine, it needs to compete with Photoshop to be a serious tool in the space it serves. And what the vast, vast majority of artists have said is that it is insufficient for that.

Can you crop a photo in it? Sure, once you figure out the placement of things.

Can you perform serious photo manipulation? Somewhat, although Photoshop takes way less cognitive cost (so more people can be more productive).

Economics of attention are important.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#286

Post by wellbehaved »

I think open source is a kind of compensation for the fact that our political economy doesn't create meritocracies, analogous to how when one part of your body is injured some other part compensates. The compensation isn't "good" in the sense that it's bad to be injured and therefore to need it, but without the compensation things would be even worse.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#288

Post by heliodor »

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 only thing that held back adoption of GIMP is its perpetually horrible UX.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#289

Post by benreesman »

I think this hinges a great deal on how strict the definition of OSS is.

There’s a (generally positive IMHO) trend towards more SOTA stuff being source available over time, but if it’s part of your business you’re paying someone to maintain and support it (even if it’s yourself). And a vibrant range of options from elite proprietary niche stuff to radically-licensed free software is a great thing!

Compilers are a great case-in-point: for ages ‘GCC’ was knocking the stuffing out of much/most commercial stuff, at the moment the pendulum has swung almost completely over to LLVM which is like, way more tied into industry, and maybe it swings back at some point.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#290

Post by lokar »

bruce511 wrote: post #158
latchkey wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is the Pinto of SaaS That's some strong personal opinion... source? GCP has been extremely performant and reliable for me across several different companies. I'm not saying that people have definitely run into issues, which we've all read about here on HN, but this sounds more like squeaky wheel than the norm. > Thanks to their "no support" policy, Their support has been excellent, when I've needed it, which…

>> That's some strong personal opinion... source? It's absolutely personal perception. Ford made a couple millions Pintos, I never had one, much less saw one explode in a fireball, but I'm not rushing out to buy one either. My perception is borne from a long history of reading stories here. Over time they create a perception in me that Google regularly drops products, changes APIs, changes pricing, closes accounts, w…

IME this perception is based on customers using the self service/cc versions of the service.

If what you are doing is important get a sales rep and invoice billing. This is actually tru of any service, but Google is particularly bad. You don't want to be caught up in their automated fight against fraud and abuse

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