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Time Till Open Source Alternative

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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#161

Post by jedberg »

latchkey wrote: post #92
lokar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCP tends to be designed for customers that are staffed with mostly Google engineers.

Source? This comment seems absurd, at best. I am no 'google engineer' (is that supposed to be a bad thing?) and I've been using and loving GCP for well over a decade. Built several extremely successful businesses on it.

What they're saying is that Google is opinionated. They determine that their way is the right way and you will do it their way. As opposed to Microsoft and Amazon, who both ask their customers, "how do you want to solve this problem?" and then build what the customers want.

If the way Google has decided you should build something happens to work for you, great, but for most people, they want a product built around how they like to operate, not get told how to do it.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#162

Post by rapnie »

nine_k wrote: post #99
smegsicle wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you can herd a cat, you can herd a sheep

They require different approaches. The best way to herd cats is by a laser pointer: show a clear, shining goal, and you don't need to give more directions. With sheep, you need to run circles around them and so drive their formidable grass-cutting capacity where you want it to be, slowly.

Nice analogy. I like that. For the laser you likely need to show an indicator for the distance to the bright red spot, and break it into measurable chunks (like a roadmap) to which actionable steps can be attached. Tbh a cat won't do anything with that, but to the feline breed of FOSS developers it may help to keep (and understand the importance of) product focus. Although you might just focus the bright spot on farther away objectives when the felines get closer to it, to refocus their attention.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#163

Post by kristopolous »

The methodology is really flawed.

Why Microsoft office and not Lotus symphony which predated it 6 years? There is plenty of open source typesetting software and editors that goes back to the 70s. Why use OO as the comparator?

You want a GUI? Abiword is 1998. A suite? Koffice is 2000.

Why not compare it with VisiOn or WordStar?

And Word came out in 1983, why not start the clock there? Office was announced in 1988, why not there?

Electric Pencil was 1976, that's where GUI word processing that led to WordStar, WordPerfect and MS Word really started, why not that?

Xerox BravoX was 1972, there was a commercial product called the Xerox 860 with it in 1974, why not that? Here's a commercial from 1977, I think that obviously counts: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lQb8hgg2gGs

Nope 1990. It's totally arbitrary

All of these have that same flaw. Before Netscape was Cello in 1993, MacWWW in 1992, both commercial. It was a mix of open source and commercial the whole time.

Photoshop was just a knockoff of Deluxepaint which was a knockoff of the Quantel Paintbox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox

Here's a video of the use. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BwO4LP0wLbY

Again just an arbitrary year.

Besides, in the long history of software, what's open source? Are we talking the cabinets next to the TX-0 at MIT in the 1960s with paper tapes that you could cut copy and modify? The source code published for free in the zines and journals marked public domain in the 1970s through things like flexi-discs? People broadcasting software over CB radio in the 1980s? Only things released after the modern regime of copyrights was collected and cataloged?

It's just sloppy, arbitrary data and therefore invalid conclusions. This is bad science.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#164

Post by hilbert42 »

joshmanders wrote: post #123
pjmlp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those of us that realise our salaries must come out from somewhere, do like paying others for the work we profit from.

I think the correlation of people who don't like paying for things and engineers are because most engineers are people who learned computers at a young age and found piracy, etc as their goto way to learn things because I know I couldn't afford Macromedia Dreamweaver when I was a kid, but I used it... So now most think "why would I pay when I can pirate or use an alternative that is a pain to setup but once you get o…

I use mainly open source software so I don't use pirated stuff in any of my operational systems as it poses too many problems.

So too is licensed commercial software as Adobe's Photoshop licensing scam shows. One of my most annoying examples is UltraEdit a text and code editor originally from IDM Computer Solutions, now Idera, Inc.

Years ago I bought a perpetual upgrade license which at the time was quite expensive when compared to a single-version purchase but along the way IDM introduced a website locking mechanism to stop pirating and it turned out to be a big problem.

If one didn't uninstall UltraEdit correctly the IDM website deemed it to still be installed. Now, we're all pretty familiar with that except the trouble was that I'd be forever changing the O/S or blue-screening it and I'd often forget to uninstall U/E first - and it was the only instance of server-locked software on my machine (having vowed long before IDM changed the rules never to buy software licensed in this way).

I should note that multiple installed instances were never a problem as the license permitted three copies and I only ever had one installed copy at a time. The problem was continual difficulties in resolving the 'dead' license count on the server as the company just wasn't interested in helping. So the solution was to remain on the last of the non-locked versions (U/E for Windows v16.2).

So I felt cheated and I still do. Moreover, the company lost sales, I didn't buy UltraCompare nor did I put UltraEdit or it on my Linux systems as was my original intention.

Frankly, most commercial software sucks big-time, long live open source.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#166

Post by rapnie »

nine_k wrote: post #107
bsder wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, adoption of GIMP has not likely materially increased over time (as a relative percent of total addressable market) This is an interesting question to me because Adobe only recently moved to cloud/subscription fairly recently. Before that, you could get a physical copy of Photoshop and keep it running forever. As that pathway fades, it will be interesting to see if something will finally supplant Photos…

I think if you want to do digital art, you use Krita, not Gimp.

Yes, and Blender. Both examples where productization is better. Likely marketing and community building around the software is much better too.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#167

Post by pronlover723 »

cryptonector wrote: post #153
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…

Infrastructure has a bit of a tragedy of the commons thing going on. No one wants to pay for everyone else's infrastructure. So any software project that is infrastructure tends to suffer from lack of funding, whether it be proprietary software or open source. There are exceptions, naturally. E.g., PostgreSQL and SQLite, and Linux. To overcome the tragedy of the commons you need tons of interest and community. Everyo…

Is there any place there are actual statistics on this. Say the top 10k most used open source projects across languages where each project has the amount of money spent to maintain it / the number of people hours needed to maintain it and where the maintainers care to be remunerated?

I really don't know which open source projects are under funded. Firefox, Python, LLVM, Clang, .NET, Chromium, Electron, VSCode are certainly adequately funded. There are also projects like some of my own that have a few 100 or 1000 users but I don't need/want funding for them. Maybe if they got 10k or 100k users and I actually got lots of support requests that would change.

I'm sure there are several under funded projects but it'd be nice to see some qualitative data instead of just feeling it must be true.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#168

Post by parksy »

All power to the author and the passion for open source is admirable, I just don't think we'll be seeing a world in "a couple more decades" where all software will be open source.

The assertions in the opening sentences seem flawed due to selection bias in the supporting data. Out of the entire universe of software, the subset of examples are hand-picked pairings of commercial + open source software. There is little consideration given to the abundance of software without an open source alternative, whether the selected alternatives had meaningful impact on market share, products that started out as open source only to be outcompeted by a commercial clone of the work, etc.

Anecdotally I've seen many commercial products copy innovations from open source alternatives. Could it be possible that having an open source alternative provides a risk-free and cost-free testbed for innovation? Open source software could in fact be a boon to an established product. Anyone considering starting an open source product would want to be aware of this threat to their success. Definitely a more in-depth study would be required to establish any sort of certainty.

I've worked on projects across many industries and am no longer surprised by the abundance of niche proprietary use-cases where the established product is deeply ingrained in the very culture of the job, where an open-source alternative would require extremely deep domain knowledge and years of development (in many industries where having development skills is rare). For someone to come along and attempt to make an open source alternative, they would need to be dissatisfied with the commercial product, have the domain expertise, and be a competent developer with time and resources to build an open source alternative, and then have to battle against the momentum of literally everyone being trained and used to using the existing toolchain. That's not even considering that many algorithms are proprietary so simply building an open source replacement runs the risk of infringing IP.

Whatever the use-case, and aside from academic or passion projects, all software development arises out of necessity. In these niches, it's usually a desire to improve accuracy, reduce time spent on repetitive and arduous tasks, and generally just de-risk and improve efficiency. These needs generally arise in-house, and where no solution exists, companies will contract a developer or outsource to an agency and subsequently retain the IP for competitive advantage or license out its use.

In order for open source to truly replace all commercial software, the entire culture surrounding this would need to change, and this is not a software problem but a social and economic one, and without a paradigm shift I think the status quo is more likely to continue - as long as there are businesses competing in diverse and niche technical fields, proprietary software will continue to be built.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#169

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

singhrac wrote: post #157
osigurdson wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like someone with great ideas started working on Gmail and quit before it was finished. Whatever they are doing to organize emails in a "smart" way is super confusing. I kind of get it but it just doesn't work. They should either finish it or just revert back to organizing emails by date of arrival.

Gmail quality dropped off a cliff all of a sudden. In particular, many many emails get sent to spam now, including emails sent by Google itself! Notifications about calendar invites regularly get sent to spam at inconvenient times. I can't tell if this is just some sort of temporary spam filter tweaking error and oversight or an emergent property of a content-based filtering system that they won't revert.

Funny, I have the opposite problem, which could actually explain your problem.

I never used to get spam through GMail's filters, but in the last six-ish months I now get a couple every day. They're almost always the same format, too - frequently just a link, and often coming from an outlook.com email address.

So a possible hypothesis is that spammers got good at evading GMail's filter, so in tweaking it to catch these new spam techniques they could be causing more false positives.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#170

Post by cyborgx7 »

jacooper wrote: post #97
dane-pgp wrote: post #3

> all software will be open source, and no one will make money with software. The first half of that statement doesn't imply the second half at all. Perhaps, in the future, companies will see the writing on the wall and plan on re-licensing their software under an open licence once they have made a profit from their initial investment (and built a community to maintain the code base going forwards). Taking that idea…

It doesn't even have to be that. Nextcloud is fully libre, yet its a company with income and profit.

Yes, but not from selling the software. Nextcloud makes money from hosting and support, exactly as the article lines out.
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