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Time Till Open Source Alternative

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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#241

Post by moonchrome »

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 works when big players decide it's economical to comoditize something and do it in the open to share cost and get testing, also good will, etc.

This is why it's mostly in infrastructure. But it works in product applications - like Epic contributing to Blender because it enables their platform.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#242

Post by JonChesterfield »

rapnie wrote: post #162
nine_k wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fart…

Bright light in the distance works for me. A lot of the interest is in the path finding process - dead ends and cycles included. A bright light in the distance that someone else has broken into measurable chunks is totally unappealing.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#243

Post by grey_earthling »

Closi wrote: post #206
ThalesX wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being such succesful products, all of these taken together probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad business...

> Being such succesful products, all of these taken together probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad business... Assuming this post is sarcasm, Are we really going to criticise Google Search for not being profitable? Google has an ad business because of these products, not seperate to them.

I'd say that Google has these products (really, services) because of its ad business, not the other way round.

Someone more familiar with Google's oeuvre can probably answer this: all those well-liked services that Google unceremoniously cancelled — were they the ones that didn't help (or harmed) Google's ad business?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#244

Post by klabb3 »

flohofwoe wrote: post #217
klabb3 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal and chromium as well. I am not sure about Ubuntu, but to me it looks like they have a product/design org. Blender would be another example. How are they run?

Blender is a foundation: https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/

Interesting. So all of the examples have salaried design and product folks?

Meanwhile there's thousands of volunteering FOSS projects that are engineers only. Do product & design people not have passion projects? Or they do but are for some reason unable to collaborate with engineers (or vice versa)?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#245

Post by hilbert42 »

hilbert42 wrote: post #129
unknownaccount wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GIMP is supposed to be a Photoshop alternative? But is missing so many features which don’t even seem that hard to code? I always thought it was supposed to be some weird middle ground between Paint and Photoshop.

For years, I've looked to GIMP as an alternative to Photoshop but now I've given up the idea. Yes, it's missing many features but my main reason for dropping it is its perverse operation, it's just too awkward and clumsy to use. I can only conclude the reason that these inherent problems with GIMP have remained uncorrected for so long is that its developers couldn't give a damn whether we use it or not. It seems only…

I forgot to add the last straw for me was the removal of GIMP's 'Fade' feature. I'm aware of the alterative but it's not as convenient.

User ergonomics in software is extremely important and its removal is a big anti-feature. At the time GIMP's developers didn't offer an apology, they just said that's the way it's going to be on 'technical grounds'.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#246

Post by troad »

lrvick wrote: post #239
troad wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I used Photoshop for 8 years, including for web development, before switching to Gimp. Gimp is good enough for everything one needs in web dev, is free, and has a vital feature Photoshop lacks: the ability to run on a Linux workstation. When developing software intended for Linux servers the value of having a Linux workstation to easily do local development cannot be understated.

> I used Photoshop for 8 years, including for web development, before switching to Gimp.

> Gimp is good enough for everything one needs in web dev, is free, and has a vital feature Photoshop lacks: the ability to run on a Linux workstation. When developing software intended for Linux servers the value of having a Linux workstation to easily do local development cannot be understated.

Precisely. You're a dev for whom GIMP is "good enough". If you were dissatisfied you might make a new tool, but since GIMP suffices, you happily use it and see no reason for anything else.

Meanwhile, artists and designers who work in Photoshop day in and day out - the people comprising the bulk of Photoshop's actual market - overwhelmingly reject GIMP, and they don't generally have the capability to make a new tool, so they stick with Adobe.

At the risk of making an imperfect analogy, imagine you wrote a French textbook. French teachers overwhelmingly rejected your textbook and didn't use it in their classrooms. But at the same time, other language professionals sometimes found it helpful for small things like double checking the conjugation of some obscure verb, and they'd defend it because they found it useful. Is your French textbook a success? I'd say no. I'd say you're not only failing your primary market, but you're lulling fellow professionals into a false sense that there's sufficient tools out there for that market, which is doubly harmful.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#247

Post by grey_earthling »

enos_feedler wrote: post #175
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thes…

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 “incapable” of providing a less crappy service.

Compare with Thunderbird: they make money to pay the bills but no-one's getting rich. Their only way of getting money is by building a good email client — by building features that companies will pay them to build; or by making a general-purpose email client good enough that users will donate.

(I know Thunderbird is not directly equivalent because it's just a client, not an email server, but the email client part is comparable.)

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#248

Post by tluyben2 »

alkonaut wrote: post #204

How much market share did these alternatives take? With few exceptions the Desktop OSS apps are simply inferior to commercial options because UX requires consistency requires both an organization that is hard to form in OSS, and it requires extreme amounts of dull repetitive work of specific roles (graphic/interaction designers) that are still rare in OSS. Few of the larger applications in the commercial column will…

> Most software is boring niche business software.

That would be enough to call the conclusion bogus; there are millions of software packages that are written in specific niches which would bore anyone to death. They are also often written over years or even decades with input from 10 to 1000s of employees of a company. There is always money in that for software. And you can say; ok, so let’s skip internal software; a lot of software starts as internal and becomes a packaged or saas product after. I know many companies who wrote very niche internal software over the years and then decided to start selling it to competitors.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#250

Post by Gigachad »

bambax wrote: post #191
Gigachad wrote: post #2

>All software will be open source, and no one will make money with software. I'm really not convinced. The chart shows Photoshop having an alternative in with GIMP in 1998. And 24 years later, people are still paying lots of money for Photoshop. Pretty much all of these examples are similar. Yes open source has replaced some categories of paid software like VCS, but in a way it just opened up more paid software in th…

> If you want to make an actual alternative to Photoshop you'll need thousands of workers spread over a lot of skill sets. You need cloud technology specialists, AI/ML experts, R&D, design experts to do real studies and interviews with users, etc. Photopea is a feature-complete online image editor. It's widely successful. It's not open source, but it's the work of just one guy.

Nothing is ever feature complete, or alternatively, and image editor is feature complete when it reads my mind and spits out the perfect image without me doing any work. Anything short of that is room for improvement. Sure, there are a lot of people who don't need everything photoshop offers, but there are also a lot that do so people will continue paying for proprietary software for as long as that proprietary software gets the closest to spitting out the right image with the least effort.
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