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Time Till Open Source Alternative

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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#291

Post by sidlls »

butterNaN wrote: post #193
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…

It is impossible to be without ideology. Even if you think you're free from it, you just subscribe to the 'default' ideology of your environments. Meeting market demands _is_ an ideology.

That’s a fair point: but it doesn’t change the underlying narrative. The ideology motivating development of (F)OSS alternatives frequently produces software that is not as good as that produced by a market-demand ideology.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#292

Post by maire »

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…

Engineers continually discount the importance of usability.

The easy applications to convert to open source are those that the developer of the application is the user of the application. The easiest example is Bitkeeper to GIT conversion. The person who wrote GIT is the same person who used Bitkeeper. Therefore he knew what would be usable for a developer.

GIMP vs Blender is the counter example. Both GIMP and Blender are targeted at artists and not developers. The author assumes the awesomeness of Blender is inevitable. But GIMP is pretty bad and shows no evidence that it is getting better. Yet - when major animation studios decided to adopt Blender they dedicated UX resources to Blender to make it more usable for artists.

When the developer is not the user, you need that extra step.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#293

Post by analog31 »

I doubt there's a single reason for the staying power of proprietary software, that explains all of the examples. But here are some of my thoughts:

1. Really sweating the details of the UI, and managing the vast number of edge cases that users are uncannily able to discover, takes an army of programmers doing work that they only enjoy well enough to do it for a lot of money.

2. Not knowing what the software is used for gives the incumbent an advantage. They don't need to know -- just keep making the same thing, which is mainly what the user wants. Until they try to design Version 2, god help them. Anybody else is stuck replicating all of the incumbent's features. Programming tools don't have this problem because users can implement their own features.

3. The economics have to make sense. I don't pay for my annual subscription to , and it's chump change for my employer. A workshop that tries to cheap out on CAD will lose their designers.

4. A lot of software flies below the radar. I've never seen any of my employer's software products mentioned on HN, yet we're quite a big company.

5. Software tied to other stuff, such as hardware, databases (and data), etc. That stuff is effectively a dongle.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#294

Post by jstummbillig »

maire wrote: post #292
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…

Engineers continually discount the importance of usability. The easy applications to convert to open source are those that the developer of the application is the user of the application. The easiest example is Bitkeeper to GIT conversion. The person who wrote GIT is the same person who used Bitkeeper. Therefore he knew what would be usable for a developer. GIMP vs Blender is the counter example. Both GIMP and Blende…

> Engineers continually discount the importance of usability.

The real issue, unfortunately, is worse: It's a lack of empathy for the user.

Usability need no explaining to an engineer. You have your 500$ mechanical keyboard. You your carefully crafted .vscode and you lust for that e-ink monitor.

Unfortunately, you don't understand that you are different to the average user of the thing you are working on and in that thing you are working on, your job is to serve the user.

To be fair, this is not a struggle unique to engineers, far from it. Professions, that is very adamant about conveying this during training are teachers, therapists (and I explicitly don't include physicians, although they can be) and, to a wildly varying degree because of what the job means nowadays, designers.

People working in most other professions default suck at this.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#295

Post by zeruch »

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 was about to write about 80% of what you wrote, so Im glad I parsed the comments first (and GIMP & Krita were going to be my examples, as well as the AWS-ification of things like Elastic) but to me the real crux is "open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure".

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#296

Post by zeruch »

troad wrote: post #261
mid-kid wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

"if GIMP hadn't been so resistant to input from artists and designers, Krita wouldn't need to exist at all"

Thats not far off at all actually.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#297

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#298

Post by ectopod »

dotancohen wrote: post #240
enos_feedler wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have observed the same thing. I _never_ saw a single spam message in years. Suddenly I am seeing strikingly obvious ones at the same frequency you are. This must be on Google's plate to fix. Surely they see it.

> Surely they see it. Do you use the Report Spam button? Because that is how they see it.

I use Thunderbird. Does gmail take notice of me moving messages to the spam folder?

(Question not directed at you specifically.)

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#299

Post by enos_feedler »

dotancohen wrote: post #240
enos_feedler wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have observed the same thing. I _never_ saw a single spam message in years. Suddenly I am seeing strikingly obvious ones at the same frequency you are. This must be on Google's plate to fix. Surely they see it.

> Surely they see it. Do you use the Report Spam button? Because that is how they see it.

Every damn time. But until the issue is resolved, I will assume that button is just a NOP designed to make people feel good.
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