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Time Till Open Source Alternative

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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#321

Post by johnfn »

supportlocal4h wrote: post #302
johnfn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I couldn't disagree more strongly! Programming is like building a house on shifting sand. How many projects that you haven't touched in the last 5 years still run? If you're anything like me, the percentage is vanishingly small - and my old projects aren't even that complicated. If you find that this is a belief "common in forums like HN with lots of programmers", I suspect that's because engineers are the most…

Ah, shucks. Let's not argue. You're both right. Can we embrace great points on both sides without strong diageement?

Haha, you know what, that's pretty fair.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#322

Post by singhrac »

grey_earthling wrote: post #247
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.

Would fixing it improve their ad business? I'm still surprised by how often people (not necessarily you!) forget about misaligned purposes: your purpose for using Gmail is to have a good email service; Google's purpose for running Gmail is to make money, _not_ necessarily by providing a good email service. When purposes misalign like that, you get users bewildered about why such a competent company would be “incapabl…

So interestingly I think "better spam detection" has a relatively straightforward interface (e.g. connect this app to Gmail's servers via SMTP, move emails between folders), but I assume you need almost Google-scale (or at least more than startup-scale) metadata and spam report collection to be able to do half as well.

One of the rare areas where barrier to innovation isn't market access but actually product quality. That being said I wouldn't pay a lot for this as a standalone service, though I would definitely pay for a standalone email client at this point.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#323

Post by Old_Thrashbarg »

gregmac wrote: post #57

> all software will be open source There's a heck of a lot of "boring business software" out there, often quite niche, solving problems various businesses have. Anything that survives, just by virtue it has survived, has a positive ROI for everyone involved, including the customer. Where is the supposed alternative going to come from? Are people being paid to write that software suddenly going to stop and go build it…

Right, my startup work on compliance tech for the construction industry. Pretty gritty work trying to simplify and automate regulations that are constantly changing.

Can't imagine anyone doing this open source.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#324

Post by phendrenad2 »

ksec wrote: post #144
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. (and pretty good at infrastructure products). Oh This is Great. Thank You. Will have to bookmark your comment. Perfectly describe something I have in my mind but couldn't quite put it into precise wordings. Open Source works, and its desired in infrastructure because everyone relies on them. And its common interest align with…

It's because open-source favors "those who show up and code" (I recall a blog post about the Apache Foundation saying that was what they valued). If you can't code, but you can make UI/UX suggestions, or come up with a way to productize the raw codebase, you're usually ignored or (worse) mistaken for a coder and people ask you when you'll have a PR ready.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#325

Post by phendrenad2 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #294
maire wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is also true. I get into arguments all the time with people who start by saying "Oh it's easy" and then after I prove that it's hard, say "I don't care that it's hard for other people". It's just a sort of blindness for your internal shortcutting of "I don't care that it's hard for others, it's easy for me" to "It's easy to everyone that matters" to "It's easy for everyone".

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#326

Post by netmonk »

opan wrote: post #222
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…

There is a limit to supply: the number of hardware unit able to run it.

Cost isn’t irrelevant. Either you burn software on floppy, cd or make it available over internet and download, all those have a cost. Also between cost or RD and development, documentation writing, there cost after sales with customer support and product patching.

Open source is like blogging. You bear the cost (hidden or not) to publish you work for which you are very rarely paid (directly or indirectly). Once published, you lost control of potential benefit over your work,

I clearly remember the gpg développer calling for financial help after more Than 20years developing almost alone this crucial piece of software with almost 20k euros yearly income from standard job. I was working in paiement industry where this piece of software is the key element of the business protecting file transfert containing millions of euros. The company benefit was around 6billions euros a year and all this would not have been possible without a pci-dad certification based on gpg. Is it normal ? When I inform them that the author of their key piece of code so important to their business was struggling with just basic living, they didn’t move a finger. While myself as a self employed was. One of the first to send several hundred euros to this poor guy. Once the new hit major info website, then Google or Facebook transférés some money, in an public relation initiative.

So this case is typical of why OSS is a financial failure.

When I patched ansible, I worked, I spent time and done intellectual work for this project, adding value , easing and solving problem users faced and extended the possibility of the software. When it was bought by redhat, I didn’t get a penny for my work. My family didn’t benefited from my work, as a father I failed to feed them from my work. So who can rejoice of such situation where work isn’t rewarded ? (Beside getting a little Github medal for having a PR accepted)

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#327

Post by ThinkBeat »

The first edition of windows came out in 1985. Since then, 1000s of software developers have been busy developing new versions and features. (some hit, some miss) With a major redesign in 1993 have worked on it and

Still there is no open-source replacement that can match it as a desktop operating system aimed towards end users.

The same is true of MacOS there is no open-source replacement that can match it as a desktop operating system aimed towards end users.

MacOS in addition is solely developed for end users unlike Windows which is also focused on Windows Server and Linux where the vast majority of developmet is based on server projects,embeded systems, etc not desktop

Windows allegedly has 1,5 billion -active- users Mac has 100 million. Desktop Linux allegedly has 33 million. (leaving out Android phone users, since that does not match "desktop users"

This will probably be an unpopular view at Hacker News,

and there are plenty of stories of getting your friend, mom, dad, aunt, grandparents, etc etc switched over to Linux and how great it was. But then Bluetooth, sleep, sometimes graphic cards, networking/wifi has to be resolved unless you they happen to have a laptop that matches 100% to a Linux distro.

Yes there are good efforts on creating an alternative version of Windows that is compatble but its not production ready.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#328

Post by vineyardmike »

pessimizer wrote: post #304
School-Cotton wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Richard Stallman’s personal philosophy does not define the goals of open source. Richard Stallman has nothing do do with open source, and Free software was defined as Richard Stallman's personal philosophy, take it or leave it. He hasn't changed it. I'm a complete free software advocate, but definitely only for Stallman's reasons. I have no urge to give free things to computer programmers. If I'm going to give away…

Plenty of people say “free software” or FOSS without meaning RMS’s version of it, however popular his may be.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#329

Post by vineyardmike »

grey_earthling wrote: post #247
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.

Would fixing it improve their ad business? I'm still surprised by how often people (not necessarily you!) forget about misaligned purposes: your purpose for using Gmail is to have a good email service; Google's purpose for running Gmail is to make money, _not_ necessarily by providing a good email service. When purposes misalign like that, you get users bewildered about why such a competent company would be “incapabl…

Not just google specifically, but making a product better is good for business. Eg making gmail better means more gmail users who log in more often and see more ads.

Practically speaking, most big (tech) companies probably have split teams for UI/Product and Ads. So there’s most likely a team of product managers and engineers at G who’s entire job is to make Gmail better - regardless of the ad team in the next building over. So those people literally don’t care about making G money per se, as long as they’re not introducing bugs into the ad showing logic or making it worse (see first point).

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#330

Post by vineyardmike »

XorNot wrote: post #95
threatofrain wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is GCP bad?

Personally I'm real suspicious from the time I was on a project using AppEngine, we got sandwiched between Google deciding "1 year" was an appropriate time to declare AppEngine v1 deprecated, but AppEngine v2 was still in "beta" and was removing a bunch of APIs we depended on, while basically saying "oh yeah, setup something completely different if you want something like this" (appengine datastore or whatever vs. "i…

> (aka: why I always tell people to use boring VMs for as long as possible).

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Take whatever nice features you can “for free” as tech debt, and if that api inevitably disappears… push it down the stack and own a bit more of it.

If you have to build everything from first principles it’ll take way longer to get going.

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