Ask HN: What software do you wish had a good open source alternative?

#1

Post by tim_sw » Mon, Jan 07, 2013, 5:57 PM UTC

Product or infrastructure

Re: Ask HN: What software do you wish had a good open source alternative?

#2

Post by joshbaptiste » Mon, Jan 07, 2013, 6:00 PM UTC

Lotus Notes

Re: Ask HN: What software do you wish had a good open source alternative?

#3

Post by landyman » Mon, Jan 07, 2013, 7:36 PM UTC

Rosetta Stone

Re: Ask HN: What software do you wish had a good open source alternative?

#4

Post by hapless » Mon, Jan 07, 2013, 7:45 PM UTC

joshbaptiste wrote: post #2

Lotus Notes

Groupware is still the big unsolved small-business problem in an open source stack. There have been many, many attempts to fix individual pieces of the problem, and a handful of overarching ones, but I'm not sure anyone has nailed it.

Client side: Evolution kinda/sorta works, most of the time. (And it doesn't run well on Windows or OSX.) The old Mozilla suite has just exploded -- it now takes three (haphazardly maintained -- versions last a few months at most) applications to manage what it used to do.

Server side: open source mail and mailbox servers are among the best, but is there any consensus on the best calendaring ? What clients can even talk to a CALdav server? Outlook can't.

Re: Ask HN: What software do you wish had a good open source alternative?

#5

Post by sn0v » Mon, Jan 07, 2013, 8:02 PM UTC

iTunes. I know Banshee is an alternative, but it seems to have trouble with syncing my books, for which I need Calibre as well. It would be nice to have an all in one solution that didn't suck as bad as iTunes.

Re: Ask HN: What software do you wish had a good open source alternative?

#6

Post by ryetoasthumor » Mon, Jan 07, 2013, 10:22 PM UTC

landyman wrote: post #3

Rosetta Stone

Check out duolingo.com Translate the web as you learn a language.

Disclosure: My professor at CMU runs the company.

Re: Ask HN: What software do you wish had a good open source alternative?

#7

Post by sontek » Mon, Jan 07, 2013, 11:50 PM UTC

ryetoasthumor wrote: post #6

landyman wrote: post #3

Rosetta Stone

Check out duolingo.com Translate the web as you learn a language. Disclosure: My professor at CMU runs the company.

duolingo isn't open source, so goes against the question.

That being said, duolingo is awesome :)

Re: Ask HN: What software do you wish had a good open source alternative?

#8

Post by khein11 » Tue, Jan 08, 2013, 12:10 AM UTC

GarageBand

Re: Ask HN: What software do you wish had a good open source alternative?

#9

Post by J_Darnley » Tue, Jan 08, 2013, 11:38 AM UTC

Winamp. I'm basically looking for player which has separate concepts of a playlist and a media library.

Re: Ask HN: What software do you wish had a good open source alternative?

#10

Post by lewispollard » Fri, Jan 11, 2013, 2:30 PM UTC

landyman wrote: post #3

Rosetta Stone

Anki - https://github.com/dae/anki

It's obviously not as full featured as Rosetta Stone, nor does it come with courses, nor does it use voice recognition - but it does rely on basically the same research into memory and I've had a lot more success using Anki than Rosetta Stone.