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Time Till Open Source Alternative

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Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#331

Post by mid-kid »

wowokay wrote: post #268
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…

Your second sentence doesn’t make sense because their post presented a lot of good points that move the argument past a “I don’t like it so it’s bad” argument. To knock it up another notch those same points could be applied to Linux over Windows. Market (user) adoption is the only real metric to measure against. The argument I submit is that a tool like Gimp can’t be considered better if it can’t claim the market to…

There couldn't be a wrose metric for quality than market share, because it involves many different aspects of marketing and social dynamics, as well as the context of the time in which it was created. You don't need to look further than Internet Explorer for this, or in the programming world, JavaScript. Also the parent comment didn't present any points.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#332

Post by ChrisLomont »

>Second, the trend is downward.

Yeah, there is a future that is not represented, so there is no reason to assume any downward trend. Plus he only sampled things for which there were open source alternatives (which are also questionable: e.g., AutoCAD - a full featured CAD tool versus Open Cascade, a C++ lib with no UI? Really?!).

The proper way to do such an analysis if different on almost every choice the author made:

1. Randomly, uniformly sample products/service over all time (somewhat difficult). Or better yet, make a cutoff date far enough the past to hide the fake triangle due to items being release last year.

2. Find OS alternative, it if exists, and most importantly, decide on some level of how much is is actually an alternative. Almost nothing on this list is an actual alternative, any more than a text editor is a MS Word replacement.

3. Analyze more carefully.

Post selecting products that fit a desired outcome, ignoring lots and lots of other products, ignoring the time bias, and calling things replacements that are not, then drawing these conclusions, is really bad analysis.

>it still takes years until it can outright displace the proprietary champion

How many items on even this biased selection list displaced the proprietary champion by killing their market? None? A few proprietary products died well on their own. And in this time frame, how many open source projects died?

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#333

Post by travisjungroth »

seanhunter wrote: post #183
travisjungroth wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this hunch you could break into product management by product managing open source projects. You'd certainly learn some good skills if you could do it. It would be pure influence over authority.

I'd be somewhat skeptical of anyone trying to product manage an open source project, and I think unless you were a truly exceptional product manager, most contributors would perceive your contribution as net negative if you tried that. The point of open source is people work on the things they want to work on (for the most part, obvious exceptions apply) and via a Darwinian process, what survives is the result of the…

The normal PM process wouldn't work, but I think normal PM processes are broken anyway. It also wouldn't cover all the wonderful small features, ports and fixes people like you contribute.

Any notion of "setting priorities" would go right out the window. It would have to entirely be about giving gifts, which is what open source is based on, anyway.

"I talked to 5 of our users about this problem. Here's what they said in summary, with some pull quotes. Here's how 3 other libraries solve this problem. I added 2 more ideas, made a table comparing all of them. Here's the 1 I think is the best, if anyone wants to make it."

Then it gets picked up or not (probably not lol). But no "influencing" past that. The influencing is just doing useful research, idea generation, and sharing it.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#334

Post by zeruch »

zeruch wrote: post #296
troad wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...and I guess I should add, I still use Krita as a result of the continued overall baffle-crash of GIMPs UI and general behavior, regardless of the fact that GIMP does have a great feature-set in the abstract.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#335

Post by ohiovr »

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…

The article made me think of LMMS vrs Fruity Loops. I'm pretty sure a group of people sought out to make something like Fruity Loops because the launcher comes up searching for fruit. It has some fairly remarkable limitations and I was pleasantly surprised that the free version of Fruity works perfect for me on Linux and allows unrestricted midi export which is all I needed anyway. It was a little more than a issue of taste because they really did try to replicate it but probably lost interest due to the fact that Fruity isn't too hateful to buy and it doesn't keep abusing customers with subscriptions. They upgrade and people don't always have to get the upgrade.

Lightwave 3D was already not exactly what I call high end software competing with software that was really a lot more advanced but it carved out a niche. When Blender was announced it looked pretty darn close to Lightwave and after playing with it just didn't seem intuitive enough to keep with trying to convert what little I knew already to this. But now decades later, Softimage users are fleeing to Blender. I'm pretty certain now that I will not be buying any more Lightwave upgrades. Besides, Modo is better at being Lightwave than Lightwave is. Blender is the most successful free software art and film tool since we knew what free software is.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#337

Post by titoCA321 »

bjornsing wrote: post #219

I can’t help feeling like we engineers are shooting ourselves in the foot with the open source culture: Most challenging and interesting work is turning into unpaid (open source) hobby projects. Professional software engineering is more and more about cobbling together various open source software, fiddling with configuration files and other menial tasks. Also, where is my “open source lawyer” or “open source doctor”…

Many law firms and lawyers offer pro-bono services to those that qualify. There are even lawyers and law firms that contribute to open-source organizations on legal matters regarding lawsuits and licensing. Many court motions and filings are accessible to the public if you visit the courthouse and there are organizations that make case proceedings publicly available on their public websites.

There are also medical clinics that offer medical services across the United States to those that qualify. Many medical studies and patents are publicly accessible on the web. There are organizations that offer compensation and health-care for those willing to volunteer for medical studies, questionnaires or clinal trials.

Additional lawyers and doctors offer “free” work that grow their business. Why do you think some lawyers offer free consolations. Why do some dental offices offer free cleanings or free consultations and exams when patients are looking for braces?

When folks equate “free” and “opensource” and mention “doctors” or “lawyers”, they imagine the lawyer working on their probate and wills for free or representing them on traffic accidents for “free” and in reality, that’s never going to happen.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#338

Post by mikestaub »

fsflover wrote: post #280
orbital223 wrote: post #42

It's amusing that, according to the article, there has been a "compelling open source alternative to" twitter since 2016. Yet, the ending of the article is a request for the reader to share the article on... twitter.

Mastodon technically works pretty well but lacks sufficient marketing and suffers from the network effect.

It's not marketing imo, it's the type of social network. What made linkedin and facebook take off was the fact that you follow people in your real social network. Almost all my twitter followers/followees I've never met, so there is not really a viral growth coefficient.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#339

Post by hiptobecubic »

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…

Ideas from the gmail ads team regularly get shot down by product because it would make gmail suck too much and piss everyone off.

I feel pretty bad for the ads team honestly. Like, their job is to basically just ruin products. Literally no one likes anything they do, ever. Their justification for everything is always just "You have to let us do this because $$$" and no one respects that, even though everyone knows that it's how the world works.

Re: Time Till Open Source Alternative

#340

Post by hiptobecubic »

ngrilly wrote: post #200
hiptobecubic wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also why Google sucks at so many things, despite having the best offering on paper. GCP is honestly great, but a terrible product. Stadia? Zillion chat apps? Google Inbox by Gmail by Google? Google wallet pay Android pay wallet? They all work great and would be best in class if they were decent products and you could figure out how to get them to work at all.

You’re cherry-picking examples. Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and Chrome are extraordinarily successful products.

True, although I feel like none of those products have made positive product-oriented changes in many years now. Gmail at least is spiraling down the product toilet, which makes me really sad.
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