[HN Gopher] Time Till Open Source Alternative
___________________________________________________________________
Time Till Open Source Alternative
Author : feross
Score : 452 points
Date : 2022-08-28 00:03 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (staltz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (staltz.com)
| sylware wrote:
| weird, most of the web alternatives there are not noscript/basic
| (x)html friendly. For instance, I cannot even browse the
| directory of owncast! Peertube gives me a blank page. Google
| financed blink/geeko or apple financed webkit only for those
| alternatives... :(
| analog31 wrote:
| I doubt there's a single reason for the staying power of
| proprietary software, that explains all of the examples. But here
| are some of my thoughts:
|
| 1. Really sweating the details of the UI, and managing the vast
| number of edge cases that users are uncannily able to discover,
| takes an army of programmers doing work that they only enjoy well
| enough to do it for a lot of money.
|
| 2. Not knowing what the software is used for gives the incumbent
| an advantage. They don't need to know -- just keep making the
| same thing, which is mainly what the user wants. Until they try
| to design Version 2, god help them. Anybody else is stuck
| replicating _all_ of the incumbent 's features. Programming tools
| don't have this problem because users can implement their own
| features.
|
| 3. The economics have to make sense. I don't pay for my annual
| subscription to <specialized technical software>, and it's chump
| change for my employer. A workshop that tries to cheap out on CAD
| will lose their designers.
|
| 4. A lot of software flies below the radar. I've never seen any
| of my employer's software products mentioned on HN, yet we're
| quite a big company.
|
| 5. Software tied to other stuff, such as hardware, databases (and
| data), etc. That stuff is effectively a dongle.
| DannyBee wrote:
| 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_. (and pretty good at infrastructure
| products).
|
| If you go look at areas where an open source thing is a de-facto
| market-leader, they are mostly infrastructure. Not all, but the
| ones that aren't have clear product management of some sort.
|
| That is - the good open source _products_ are often built /driven
| either by _extremely_ product focused people (This is rare), or
| by companies driving them with PMs.
|
| Not that the engineering doesn't matter - of course it does, but
| if you want a good and successful _product_ , engineering is just
| a part of what is needed. Sometimes not even the main part!
|
| Open source focuses mainly _on the engineering part_ , often
| creating technical meritocracies that focus on making "The
| technically best software".
|
| This is totally cool, but also totally orthogonal to building "a
| good product that people want to use".
|
| Secondarily, you have the issue of survival in marketplace (IE
| There are a rash of OSS companies achieving near 100% of total
| addressable market share, and still going bankrupt due to
| inability to monetize). This, however, is not as big an issue as
| the first (as people can always still pick it all up when that
| happens)
|
| Open source could always get better at products, but its
| historical development models were geared towards exactly the
| above (IE it does what it says on the tin)
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > it covers time, but not adoption.
|
| And you can't really cover "time" in an objective way before
| first determining some reasonable threshold for adoption, which
| is about as hard to objectively define as it gets. This means
| all the data presented in this article is basically
| meaningless.
|
| For example, _way_ before Github we already had open source
| code hosting & collaboration servers. Trac comes to mind, but
| there's an even better example -- Gitorious, which also came
| before Github. Why did the author not even consider these two
| examples and only named Gitlab es the "replacement" for Github
| ? I could understand the omission of Trac since perhaps it was
| not primarily Git-based, but Gitorious? Gitorious was even at
| one point the #1 Git platform, eventually surpassed in
| popularity by Github (and much, much later by Gitlab).
|
| Is this a "proprietary alternative replacing a open source one"
| ? How do you even take this into account in your "Time until
| OSS alternative" metric ? It just shows how meaningless this
| all is without a subjective definition of "alternative" or
| "replacement". There is no way to present this objectively as
| the authors are trying to do. The entire data set is
| manipulated to fit their point.
|
| The rest of "replacements" are similarly questionable or even
| ridiculous, because, depending on your definition, they either
| ignore alternatives that came much earlier (because
| surprisingly frequently a proprietary "service" replaces a
| popular open source program) or call a service "an alternative"
| when it is simply not.
| la_fayette wrote:
| This sometimes might be true, but there are many
| counterexamples. If you look at the web content management
| systems, the market is dominated by well-engineered open source
| CMS products, e.g., Drupal, ez Publish, typo3... Even for
| webshops this true: presta shop, opencart, ...
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Firefox, VLC, Signal, chromium, codium, veracrypt, ublock
| origin, bitwarden, ubuntu...
| nickelpro wrote:
| None of these are counter-examples to what the OP said
|
| > Not all, but the ones that aren't have clear product
| management of some sort.
|
| That's effectively all of these except maybe ublock.
|
| If you don't have someone trying to sell some portion of
| your code base, true community efforts not a commercial
| effort that happens to be OSS, you're probably an
| infrastructure project.
| astrange wrote:
| Firefox is made by a company. VLC has a product manager
| (who owns the VideoLAN Foundation).
| klabb3 wrote:
| 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?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Blender is a foundation:
|
| https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/
| klabb3 wrote:
| 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)?
| sbuk wrote:
| It's a complex problem. Design agencies and individual
| designers are blighted by the spectre of "spec work"
| [https://www.nospec.com]
| [https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1].
| The tl;dr of it is that business will approach agencies
| and demand they work on a product for free, of a a cost
| lower than the wok is worth in an act of good faith for
| the promise of fully paid work in the future. Except the
| work rarely comes. The upshot is designers are taught the
| value of their worth at college/university.
|
| The other problem is the FOSS community itself. See the
| concurrent post about GIMP
| [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32624055].
| Opinionated devs that either don't see the value of
| design or having a designer. I know that this isn't true
| for all projects, but there a bad apples amongst the
| bigger, more well known projects (GNOME for example) that
| will spoil it for everyone else. Again, GIMP is a great
| example of this. As a result, most 'passion projects'
| lead to designers working on small projects that inspire
| them, which are rarely software related, ore they look to
| create something that can provide an income, either as a
| small second income or as a new business.
| ghaff wrote:
| Canonical basically supports Ubuntu. (Over and above the
| Linux kernel and other components many of which are
| supported by many different companies (and individuals).
| nickelpro wrote:
| A CMS is infrastructure, it's business facing not user facing
| la_fayette wrote:
| I consider the content editors as end users of a CMS. The
| website visitor is not using the CMS.
| realityking wrote:
| There's a large proprietary CMS market, mostly Adobe
| Experience Manager, Sitecore, EpiServer/Optimizely. There's
| also the more recently risen headless/SaaS content platforms
| such as Contentful, Sanity, Contentstack, etc. At the bottom
| end of the market you got Webflow, Wix, and Squarespace.
|
| Wordpress and Drupal do compete but the market is not
| dominated by open source if you look at more than just the
| count of websites.
|
| Similar things are true in commerce. Salesforce Commerce, SAP
| Commerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and commercetools are all not
| open source but very sizable businesses.
| omnimus wrote:
| It might seem like domination but its just the biggest field.
| The pie is huge, everybody needs CMS. So everybody eats and
| if you focus on one segment it might see like its domination.
|
| I would say if anything every other website now is Webflow.
| Every shop is Shopify. And highest quality CMSes are
| commercial products like Craft CMS or Kirby CMS. So serious
| projects often grab those instead of OSS offerings.
| la_fayette wrote:
| Ok, there is for sure a closed source offering. Although,
| if you look at the data of the 1 millio top site on
| builtwith a strong oss share is clearly visible. It goes
| without saying that wordpress has the overall largest
| share, which technically might not be considered a fully-
| fledged CMS...
| rr808 wrote:
| > de-facto market-leader, they are mostly infrastructure
|
| Maybe its technical users? Even linux is used by IT pros rather
| than regular people. I think tech people just dont like paying
| for anything.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Yet we happily buy Macs and IntelliJ licenses and pay for
| alternatives to Gmail.
|
| Linux, is quite frankly the best dev environment you can get.
| MacOS is a nice compromise if you need some commercial
| software too. At least it's still a Unix.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Those of us that realise our salaries must come out from
| somewhere, do like paying others for the work we profit from.
| joshmanders wrote:
| 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
| over that initial pain, it's smooth sailing" whereas others
| are like "I don't have time nor desire to do that, just
| take my $10/mo"
|
| I personally stopped pirating and started paying for stuff
| for the same reasons you stated, and also because I felt
| like a hypocrite expecting people to pay me for my work,
| when I wouldn't pay others for their work.
| pronlover723 wrote:
| I think it comes from being young with no disposable
| income and carrying that idea for too long. The older I
| get the more I pay. I have the money, I value my time, I
| value other people's time, I try to pay them one way or
| another.
|
| I paid for Sublime Merge when I could have used one of
| the 10 other free git front ends. I can't say there is
| any particular feature I use that are not available in
| the other front ends.
|
| I've been paying $299 up front and $120 a year for a text
| editor since the 90s and I rarely use it anymore (I use
| VSCode more) but I still find I go back to it once in a
| while and while $120 a year might sound like a lot it's
| less than I'm being paid by the hour so I can spend hours
| or days searching for alternatives or I can just pay the
| $120 and keep using the solution I know. I donate to
| several open source projects monthly and have given $50
| or $100 here or there to others.
|
| At the same time, I have to really get a ton of value out
| of the project. Blender, Kodi, a few large libraries that
| would take me months to repo I'm happy to donate. People
| making a 1k-5k line project and asking for funding though
| kind of seem like bad faith actors. It's like they're
| ignoring the tons of stuff they get for free and instead
| of giving back they're being miserly. It'd be like going
| to a potluck party, everyone brings something for free
| but one person brings beers and asks $2 per can while at
| the same time eating from all the free food.
|
| People complain about corps using open source and not
| paying but I personally don't see it that way. Most tech
| corps give back in one way or another. Apple gives Clang,
| LLVM, JSC, WebKit... Google gives Chromium, Go, Dart,
| Flutter, Core Android, Skia, ... Facebook gives React,
| React-Native, PyTorch, ... Microsoft gives .NET, C#, F#,
| VSCode, Electron, Github (free hosting and free CI for
| open source), and even in if some corp, GM? uses open
| source I'm sure they give back to society in some way.
| There are few companies that are all take and no give.
|
| Maybe another way to frame it, I see lots of open source
| as similar to volunteering. If go volunteer to clean up a
| park I don't get angry that lots of people come use the
| park without also volunteering to clean up. Sure, if my
| volunteering becomes a burden that makes too many demands
| of my time then I'm either going to stop or it's going to
| have to become a job but the fact that that threshold
| exists doesn't mean things below that threshold need to
| stop existing.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Exactly that.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| 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.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > If one didn't uninstall _UltraEdit_ correctly the IDM
| website deemed it to still be installed.
|
| In my experience with this kind of DRM, an email is
| generally enough to get them to reset the licence at
| their end. Still an inconvenience though, and you'll need
| to wait until they've done it.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I don't want to mislead anyone here, 'continally' means
| that was the case every time and that was quite a few but
| it was over some years - certainly not every few weeks or
| even months.
|
| On the other hand, another program I purchased for
| several hundred dollars reqired activation but was much
| easier to deal with. Despite my vow, it was one of those
| situations where I needed a quick solution so I purchased
| it fully expecting the same trouble (note, there was no
| indication on the website about the activation process).
|
| So to avoid any inconvenience through downtime, I
| inquired what happens in such circumstances and the
| almost immediate reply was 'there's no problem
| reactivating it so long as you don't do so too often
| within a given week'. Note, there was no need to inform
| the company beforehand.
|
| From my experience, that's definitely the exception to
| the norm, so not all software companies are unreasonable.
| ksec wrote:
| That is why I think most software should have an
| educational license that allow students to freely use
| their product. I mean even Steve Jobs said it on stage,
| no one pays for Adobe Photoshop in college. LOL
| pjmlp wrote:
| Most relevant software does have such licenses, that is
| how I used to buy Borland software.
| yobbo wrote:
| > open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is
| great at building infrastructure.
|
| Yes, but Android? When companies promote OSS products, they
| become successful.
|
| > totally orthogonal to building "a good product that people
| want to use"
|
| An OSS product will not end up on shelves with glitzy packaging
| for people to buy unless some company burns money to do that.
| It's not a fundamental law and OSS isn't orthogonal to
| anything.
| surajrmal wrote:
| AOSP is not a product and is not really usable by itself. It
| needs to be combined with Gapps and Google play services to
| really be considered a product. And I would argue that
| combination isn't a consumer facing product either. It's a
| product aimed at OEMs who combine it with their hardware and
| a few layers of additional hardware integration in order to
| create a consumer facing product. I know there are open
| source alternatives that replace many of these proprietary
| layers but they aren't very popular with the market.
| moonchrome wrote:
| 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.
| zeruch wrote:
| I was about to write about 80% of what you wrote, so Im glad I
| parsed the comments first (and GIMP & Krita were going to be my
| examples, as well as the AWS-ification of things like Elastic)
| but to me the real crux is "open source as a whole sucks at
| building products, but is great at building infrastructure".
| cryptonector wrote:
| 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. Everyone who contributes has to feel
| like they're getting their money's worth and that there's no
| better way. I.e., mindshare matters. Mindshare matters whether
| the thing is open source or proprietary.
| pronlover723 wrote:
| 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.
| fnord123 wrote:
| You have a good point that we can start a discussion around but
| I think you're being overly negative and falling for survivor
| bias. E.g. Does the success of Photoshop mean proprietary
| product management is superior? Or does the death of Corel Draw
| mean it's doomed to failure? And Apple, everyone's favourite
| product company, has Pages and Numbers which are not better
| than OO (and Word's incumbency is vaguely illegal).
|
| So let's put that, and FOSS dominance in browsers and IDEs and
| databases and programming languages and media players to the
| side.
|
| FOSS could do with better product management: what would it
| look like? More roadmaps? More figma/inkscape mockups? More
| user interviews?
| johnywalks wrote:
| > open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is
| great at building infrastructure
|
| Infrastructure you can trust. Most close sourced tech will lock
| you in and you're at their mercy - no thanks.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Because this is, well, the very purpose of proprietary
| infrastructure: to lock you in. Today, it seems to exist
| mostly in places where people have no choice.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I'd argue, and think GIMP is a good example, that products can
| fight off open source alternative adoption by being free to
| certain groups.
|
| Piracy, student discounts, shareware, limited trials.
|
| You could still consider this a win for open source, as it
| stops market abuse and restricts those paying to the people who
| depend on the software for business reasons and who haven't had
| their trust sufficiently broken that they switch over to open
| source to prevent abuse (which is the story in infrastructure,
| you're basically a sharecropper if you're building on non-open
| source infra).
| heliodor wrote:
| The only thing that held back adoption of GIMP is its
| perpetually horrible UX.
| AmalgatedAmoeba wrote:
| No, it's really not (unless you mean the literal, holistic
| user experience and not what the term usually refers to).
| GIMP is lacking the tools and integrations that make
| Photoshop seem like magic, while not being more performant
| or offering much of a benefit beyond being OSS. The
| lackluster UI is just the cherry on top.
| rozab wrote:
| The key example for this is BitKeeper. They signed their own
| death warrant by ceasing to provide free licenses to open
| source developers. Unfortunately, one of the projects using
| it was Linux. Linus was forced to write git and the rest is
| history
| matijsvzuijlen wrote:
| Wasn't that Perforce?
| ajb wrote:
| No, it was bitkeeper: https://lwn.net/Articles/131657/
| dotancohen wrote:
| That is not a win for open source because reducing payments
| is not a goal of open source. Assured continuation of
| availability and ownership of user's data is the explicit
| goal of the FOSS movement as stated by RMS. That means that
| it will continue to run on your hardware, and won't lock your
| data, and you can fix the bugs and suit it to your purpose.
|
| Money was never the issue.
| umanwizard wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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
| free stuff, I'll give to the poor. I don't have any
| special sympathy towards the needy computer programmer
| just because they share my hobby/vocation.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| RMS is on record as supporting BSD style licences for
| certain things because without them, proprietary software
| would have an even stronger stranglehold.
|
| https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3
|
| So it's not totally black and white, there's tactics and
| strategy involved. The less money going to Adobe, the less
| power and control they have. If they can force you to pay,
| they can force you to do other things. If they can't force
| you to pay, then they can't force other things as well.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The corollary is that FOSS-induced e.g. "student
| versions" of Adobe software entrench vendor lockin, as
| the students learn only Adobe software.
| troad wrote:
| 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 Photoshop -
| a product no serious Photoshop pro could ever figure out or
| be satisfied with - I'd give you something very much like
| GIMP. The fact that open source devs are generally content
| with GIMP is fantastic (for Adobe): it reduces the risk
| they'll create something actually competitive among artists
| and designers. Plus, Adobe gets to point to the GIMP if
| they're ever accused of monopolistic or anti-competitive
| behaviour.
| mid-kid wrote:
| 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 prevents people from innovating, and
| puts pressure on anyone thinking of even attempting such a
| daunting task.
|
| Furthermore, even if I were to agree, your argument
| completely falls apart with the existence of Krita. Writing
| software like this is hard and time-consuming, which is the
| primary reason we haven't seen more projects of this scale,
| as there's been various smaller-scale tools over the years,
| like Pinta.
| wowokay wrote:
| 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 prove it, if it
| was fundamentally better at its core adoption would pass
| the non open source leader.
| troad wrote:
| 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 deny you use of that tool.
|
| I love Krita; it's my graphics suite of choice for many
| tasks. But I can't help but think that if GIMP hadn't
| been so resistant to input from artists and designers,
| Krita wouldn't need to exist at all. It is a tool born of
| the lucky fact that someone _wasn 't_ satisfied with GIMP
| and had the technical skills to do something about it.
|
| With respect to your comment about innovation, I'd be
| more inclined to agree if, y'know, GIMP had actually done
| any of that. GIMP is not innovative, nor competitive, and
| is unable to facilitate even fairly basic tasks for
| contemporary artists and designers like working with CMYK
| images. The existence of "good-enough" GIMP is a
| hindrance to innovation in this space.
| zeruch wrote:
| "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.
| lrvick wrote:
| 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.
| KineticArms wrote:
| Photoshop runs fine on Linux. I pay for it and use it in
| Wine. Gimp is hot trash and to add insult to injury it's
| responsible for birthing Gtk; it's a fool me once fool me
| twice thing.
|
| What is this mutually shared meme-delusion that Gimp is
| anywhere close to an adequate facsimile of Photoshop?
| ghaff wrote:
| >an adequate facsimile of Photoshop
|
| For some it apparently is. There are certainly talented
| designers/artists who _really_ want an open source stack
| who can produce excellent results using GIMP. Would I
| encourage using GIMP if someone doesn 't care about open
| source? Almost certainly not, but it can be used to
| produce excellent results.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Photoshop is garbage with a randomized interface that is
| also trying to sell you things. People think it's
| intuitive because it's the industry standard and
| stockholm syndrome. GIMP is bad (but improving) on print
| color, and on non-destructive filters and layers.
|
| The hyperbolic invective hurled at GIMP by Photoshop
| users is astounding. I often spend all day in Photoshop
| and Illustrator doing preprint and it makes me want to
| burn Adobe to the ground every day. I would gladly never
| look at PS again if GIMP got color right.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > What is this mutually shared meme-delusion that Gimp is
| anywhere close to an adequate facsimile of Photoshop?
|
| It's not a facsimile of Photoshop but it serves the same
| purpose.
|
| In my experience the people who come to GIMP expecting it
| to work exactly like Photoshop are the ones who are
| disappointed, because it's not Photoshop. But if you use
| it and don't expect to already know how to use it because
| you know Photoshop, it's fine.
| tomrod wrote:
| Precisely. "It's fine" is the problem. It doesn't need to
| be fine, it needs to compete with Photoshop to be a
| serious tool in the space it serves. And what the vast,
| vast majority of artists have said is that it is
| insufficient for that.
|
| Can you crop a photo in it? Sure, once you figure out the
| placement of things.
|
| Can you perform serious photo manipulation? Somewhat,
| although Photoshop takes way less cognitive cost (so more
| people can be more productive).
|
| Economics of attention are important.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > Somewhat, although Photoshop takes way less cognitive
| cost
|
| Does it take less cognitive cost because it's actually
| easier, or because you're used to it and you're not used
| to GIMP?
| tomrod wrote:
| To be frank, I'm a regular GIMP user and have only
| dabbled in Photoshop. However, I empathize with daily
| drivers of the software.
|
| To address you're question: elements of both.
|
| As a paid service, Photoshop can afford to have developer
| research users and improve UX. GIMP, as an open source
| project, is subject to the (often well-placed) whims of
| its developers, which does not have the same profit
| motive to keep users as Photoshop.
|
| This in of itself does not guarantee less cognitive load.
| But certainly it is easier for a GIMP user to adopt
| Photoshop than it does for a Photoshop user to adopt
| GIMP.
|
| Further, we could argue the status quo is as it is
| because GIMP is less productive than Photoshop by at
| least whatever Photoshop charges per month (and possibly
| more).
| troad wrote:
| > 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's because Photoshop was early and is an industry
| standard, so you're going to have to learn it anyway.
| There's no incentive to learn GIMP because it's not going
| to cut you out of a job, and there's no incentive to move
| your shop to GIMP because all it's going to do is
| eliminate the massive bulk of the labor pool that is
| unfamiliar with it.
|
| Also, if you do print, the color situation in GIMP is not
| good.
|
| But the self-congratulation here is silly. The market
| chose Photoshop because it was the only choice. The
| market didn't place it in its position, it largely began
| the market. The reason people choose to use it is because
| they are choosing to eat, not because they think it's
| better.
|
| People who think it's intuitive or straightforward are
| _very different to me_. The GIMPs feature organization is
| far superior to PS imo, it 's just lacking a couple of
| very large features that require being woven throughout
| the implementations of everything in the data model, like
| proper color management and live filtering. That's to be
| expected from the nature of the project, because stuff
| like that would normally be focused on by a team that
| would consult with every other team to keep systems like
| that consistent and debugged. Free software has to rely
| on individual developers to get inspired to create a
| system themselves, completely married to the current
| design, that bolts what they're doing to every component.
| It's hard.
|
| But when we get it, no one can take it away from us. They
| could start charging by the minute to use Photoshop
| tomorrow.
| [deleted]
| travisjungroth wrote:
| 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.
| smegsicle wrote:
| if you can herd a cat, you can herd a sheep
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| rapnie wrote:
| 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.
| lstodd wrote:
| Like JC said - you can shove your roadmaps where you
| like, many people contribute exactly because they're sick
| of roadmaps and product foci.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| 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.
| seanhunter wrote:
| 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
| best ideas of the people who stick it out.
|
| Open source contributions I've made have been mostly because
| I need a certain feature or there's something that doesn't
| quite work right etc. Eg recently I took up qubes os. I like
| using the i3 window manager, and it had some problems on
| qubes, so I made some small contribution (I can't even
| remember what it was now) to fix that.
| surajrmal wrote:
| I think the key here is that open source infrastructure is
| often built and maintained by companies, while open source
| products are not. It takes time and effort to make things
| successful and companies have resources to make things useful
| that motivated groups of volunteers do not.
| bsder wrote:
| > 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 Photoshop.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Hasn't it been a full decade since the last perpetually
| licensed Photoshop?
| eru wrote:
| I guess five years ago you could still easily use a five
| year old pirated photoshop?
| sircastor wrote:
| We have a legit PS install on my wife's machine and it's
| preventing us from making a move to another computer for
| her. She's a casual/non-professional user. She knows the
| app and how to use it. We aren't interested in renting
| the app... basically we're holding out on that machine,
| but sooner or later it's going to become a security risk
| in our network.
| piperswe wrote:
| At some point it might be worth looking into Affinity
| Photo, it's a $55 (one-time, with free updates) cross-
| platform photo manipulation program with surprising
| feature parity with Photoshop.
| Lammy wrote:
| This is why I still use Photoshop CS3. It's the newest
| version Adobe have released as an activation-free offline
| installer, and it does everything I need and then some.
| eru wrote:
| Couldn't you run it in a VM?
| nine_k wrote:
| Likely not, because the installation is linked to the
| Windows or macOS installation.
|
| In the case of Windows, the machine can be eventually
| upgraded, one part at a time, into something more
| powerful.
| nocman wrote:
| I would not call 9 years ago "recently" (March 2013 is when
| Adobe announced it would no longer sell boxed copies of the
| Creative Suite software).
|
| Adobe obviously doesn't care. They treat their customers like
| crap and actively try to extract as much money out of them as
| possible. A few years ago (or less) they worded their
| description of their monthly subscription very carefully, so
| as to mislead people into thinking they could pay for a month
| or two when they needed it, and then cancel. The fact was
| that monthly _only_ allowed you to pay each month, it was
| _still_ an annual subscription which could not be cancelled
| without substantial early termination penalty (basically
| paying the whole remainder of the year if my memory serves me
| correctly). If they really cared about their customers, they
| would have made that very clear when you signed up for
| service. I helped a family member sign up, and there was no
| explanation, and no warning about cancellation.
|
| I wasn't thrilled about the subscription model in the first
| place, but this family member needed access to the tool.
| After the way that went down, I have no intention of doing
| business with Adobe ever again. I know a lot of other people
| who feel the same way.
|
| (edited to fix a typo)
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| > They treat their customers like crap
|
| I'm not a fan of Adobe's payment practices. But they do
| treat us well in one regard. They give us one thing that we
| can't get anywhere else. The best photo editing software on
| the market.
| omnimus wrote:
| Their products havent changed in like a decade. Its
| actually getting worse, slower and buggier.
|
| Its best photo editing software because people are so
| used to it its hard to move and everybody new has to
| learn it because its industry standard.
|
| But photo editing is not some arcane magic like it was in
| 90s. Freaking photopea.com does what photoshop does often
| much faster in browser. Not to mention million other
| affinity/pixelmator/acorn native apps.
| unknownaccount wrote:
| 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.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| 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 a play toy for its cliquey developers and the
| only reason it's available at all is that we gullible users
| act as occasional bug detectors.
|
| Sure, open software has resoure problems hence expected
| delays but too much water has flowed under the bridge for
| that now to be a viable excuse.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| 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'.
| nequo wrote:
| What did you drop it in favor of?
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Paint.NET, Inkscape, Krita, CinePaint, ImageMagick
| (command line - yes, it can be very useful at times), and
| various others when certain needs dictate.
|
| Also, Photoshop CS3 which is my last paid version
| (moreover, I can still reinstall it as Adobe
| _temporarily_ released a general version with an unlocked
| key when it abolished the CS3 licensing server some years
| ago).
|
| I even use IrfanView viewer as it has a nice batch
| converter (although it's no good for 48-bit work).
|
| Frankly, there's no shortage of image editors even after
| eliminating GIMP and Photoshop.
| nine_k wrote:
| I think if you want to do digital art, you use Krita, not
| Gimp.
| rapnie wrote:
| Yes, and Blender. Both examples where productization is
| better. Likely marketing and community building around the
| software is much better too.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Yes. Affinity Photo and Design most likely.
|
| GIMP is just awful. It's worse than any of the commercial Mac
| paint programs including Pixelmator, acorn, etc.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| 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.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Why is GCP bad?
| XorNot wrote:
| 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. "it's gone, um, redis
| maybe?")
|
| So we were stuck with a product which we were writing
| against something that the official word was would no
| longer be supported by the time we launched, while being
| told to develop against the platform which is "beta" and
| they don't want to commit to supporting the feature set of
| - and which plain couldn't be used yet at the time they
| told us this.
|
| This is just a ridiculous way to run a commercial platform
| offering (aka: why I always tell people to use boring VMs
| for as long as possible).
| trog wrote:
| For me it's partially because the interface is insanely
| slow and painful to use. Maybe this is a "I'm in Australia"
| problem but it feels like I'm wading through mud to perform
| the most basic tasks.
| dasz wrote:
| I think the usual retort is that at any moment and for any
| inexplicable reason your entire infrastructure can be
| _deleted_ for some reason you barely know let alone
| comprehend. This seems to be the case for apps at least.
|
| I neither support nor deny this belief but it's an
| increasingly common impression.
| [deleted]
| lokar wrote:
| GCP tends to be designed for customers that are staffed
| with mostly Google engineers.
| latchkey wrote:
| 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.
| jack_pp wrote:
| I suspect that if at some point you had an issue with it
| you would've been frustrated as hell by your inability to
| do anything about it and would've sworn them off forever.
| But you were the survivor that didn't have issues and
| can't seem to comprehend that as a business it is absurd
| to rely on a company that can kill you off without reason
| or recourse because you were the unlucky one that pissed
| off the algorithm.
|
| You're right, it is FUD, but it's not malicious FUD
| spread by us to spite google, it is actually _rational_
| FUD based on real reports that is entirely google 's
| fault
| latchkey wrote:
| Shrug, seems like an inherent risk with any SaaS
| provider. I worked for a large porn company and a web
| analytics product, we were one of the largest customers
| of, got sold to a Mormon company. Our account was
| terminated.
|
| I guess I'm lucky that I haven't pissed off the GCP algo
| yet.
| bruce511 wrote:
| >> seems like an inherent risk with any SaaS provider.
|
| If you see risk as binary, then yes there is risk in any
| SaaS provider, or indeed any part of your company supply
| chain. Risk though is not binary, it is measured on a
| scale of 0 to 1.
|
| There is risk every time you get in a car. But some cars
| are safer than others. Some are renowned for putting
| safety first.
|
| The vast majority of people survived their Ford Pinto, no
| doubt some loved it, but the perceived risk of driving it
| (rightly or wrongly) was higher than say a Volvo.
|
| Google is the Pinto of SaaS. Whatever the actual risks
| are, they are perceived as being higher risk than other
| SaaS providers. Thanks to their "no support" policy, the
| penalty for failure is total extinction. With most SaaS
| businesses there are humans in the loop who can make
| human decisions.
| latchkey wrote:
| > Google is the Pinto of SaaS
|
| That's some strong personal opinion... source?
|
| GCP has been extremely performant and reliable for me
| across several different companies.
|
| I'm not saying that people have definitely run into
| issues, which we've all read about here on HN, but this
| sounds more like squeaky wheel than the norm.
|
| > Thanks to their "no support" policy,
|
| Their support has been excellent, when I've needed it,
| which is rare, since it has just worked for me very well
| for a decade now. Their documentation is also pretty well
| done too. Just like with any sort of SaaS solution, you
| should be building a relationship with an account exec.
|
| I've had CloudFlare start to put in weird restrictions on
| my account once I hit a certain size. It showed up with
| requests being oddly denied and zero notification. I
| contacted my account manager (called their cell phone!)
| and the problem was resolved in a few hours. I don't even
| pay for a business plan, but I did make sure to develop a
| friendly relationship with them when they originally
| reached out to me.
| jdeibele wrote:
| Father lost his Gmail account and his Google Fi account.
| [0] Which means that he was locked out of a lot of other
| accounts because he couldn't access his email or SMS
| messages.
|
| I figure Google knows how to protect against attacks way
| better than a random email provider. I enrolled in their
| Advanced Protection Program [1] because I don't want my
| email taken over. I've used a Google Voice number
| deliberately because somebody can't walk into Verizon or
| AT&T and get my number.
|
| The idea that there's absolutely no recourse if Google
| decides I'm a bad guy. Especially since they sometimes
| seem to target associated accounts - are all of the
| family accounts going to be cancelled, too?
|
| I don't think Apple's security is as good but I'm also
| not qualified to judge that. And at least I can talk to
| support on the phone or go into a store. So I'm moving my
| email that way over time.
|
| [0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/goo
| gle-cs...
| [1]https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/
| latchkey wrote:
| The thread is about GCP, not about the rest of the Google
| products.
| bruce511 wrote:
| >> That's some strong personal opinion... source?
|
| It's absolutely personal perception. Ford made a couple
| millions Pintos, I never had one, much less saw one
| explode in a fireball, but I'm not rushing out to buy one
| either.
|
| My perception is borne from a long history of reading
| stories here. Over time they create a perception in me
| that Google regularly drops products, changes APIs,
| changes pricing, closes accounts, withholds earnings and
| so on.
|
| I'm sure millions of people happily use their services.
| However my perception of risk with Google is high, so as
| a result I don't use any (paid) Google services and I
| take my business elsewhere. Obviously I use Google
| search, and watch YouTube, but I'm happy to not put
| Google in my supply-chain, nor rely on them for revenue.
|
| Now maybe it's just bad PR. Maybe Google has real lower
| risk than say someone else. Maybe Pintos were
| statistically safer than a Volvo. But perception is
| everything, and my perception is that, given a choice,
| I'm not going to use GCP.
| lokar wrote:
| IME this perception is based on customers using the self
| service/cc versions of the service.
|
| If what you are doing is important get a sales rep and
| invoice billing. This is actually tru of any service, but
| Google is particularly bad. You don't want to be caught
| up in their automated fight against fraud and abuse
| seanhunter wrote:
| This "well over a decade" claim needs some qualification.
| GCP only became gevnerally available in Nov 2011. Before
| that, there was App Engine and Cloud Storage, but not
| GCP.
| antaviana wrote:
| Do you mean they should have said instead "within 9
| months after GCP became generally available" to be more
| precise in their statement?
| latchkey wrote:
| I jumped onto AppEngine as soon as I saw it announced
| (probably here on HN). Probably sometime around late
| 2009.
|
| Quickly convinced my friend Jeff to get onto it... we saw
| a need for a datastore wrapper and he (and I a tiny bit)
| wrote Objectify, which is one of the most widely used
| tools for AppEngine out there.
|
| Look at the license.txt... Feb 6, 2010, 13 years old...
|
| https://github.com/objectify/objectify
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| lrem wrote:
| I work in Google and think I can share: in fact we _do_
| ask our users a lot. To the point that I would be very
| surprised if any major development in GCP is allowed _at
| all_ without extensive focus groups, or coming out of
| cooperation with some major customer.
| jedberg wrote:
| Maybe lately, but certainly not at first. I was one of
| those early customers, and when I would say, "We want to
| do it like this", they would say, "Well we think this is
| how it should be done" and then ignore me. So yeah, they
| talked to customers, and just told them they were wrong.
|
| But also Google has a trust issue. I think GCP makes a
| superior product, but I would never use it. I'd be afraid
| that one of my former employees leaves the company, does
| something Google doesn't like, and they shut down my
| entire GCP account because my gmail is associated with
| the gmail of someone who did something bad, even though
| they don't work for me anymore. (Yes, this is a real
| thing that happened)
|
| I can't trust Google not to just shut down my account and
| then give me no human to talk to to get it fixed.
| latchkey wrote:
| Just because they disagreed with you doesn't mean they
| are bad.
|
| > I think GCP makes a superior product
|
| Exactly. They do.
|
| The rest is mostly just conjecture. The loudest wheels
| get the most notice... there are plenty of other people,
| like myself, who have been using GCP for a long time
| without any drama. It just works.
| latchkey wrote:
| I think that early days they were more opinionated. The
| design of the datastore is extremely google centric
| scale. Exposing it to end users was a matter of just
| "learn to use it, or not".
|
| AppEngine had a lot of limitations, like the version of
| Java you could use, because they had to basically hack at
| the JVM to get it secure enough.
|
| These days though, things like Cloud Functions, are
| effectively just simple containers and http endpoints. I
| could move them off to another provider with a days work.
| ngrilly wrote:
| You're cherry-picking examples. Google Search, Gmail, Google
| Maps and Chrome are extraordinarily successful products.
| latexr wrote:
| Depending on one's point, it can be argued that listing
| Google's successful products is the cherry-picking:
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| pessimizer wrote:
| Why would you argue? Selecting only the successes is the
| literal definition of cherry-picking. I'd say that every
| one of those cherries is very arguable, though,
| especially if one's definition of successful has any
| relation to being profitable.
| ThalesX wrote:
| Being such succesful products, all of these taken together
| probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad
| business...
| Closi wrote:
| > 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.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| 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?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Google doesn't have an ad-business, it _is_ an ad-
| business.
|
| You can't separate Google from its ad business. All of
| their major products exist in service of the ad business,
| search, inbox, even Chrome. If the services don't exist
| to help build a profile of you, they exist to help build
| a profile of web traffic and detect ad-fraud, or to
| simply shape the landscape into one that isn't hostile to
| google's ads.
| osigurdson wrote:
| 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.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I was trying to find sent mail and only way I found it was
| by searching mail where I was the sender.
|
| Smart but not obvious.
| butterNaN wrote:
| I switched to basic HTML gmail the moment it tried to
| predict what I wanted to type (often incorrectly, which
| worsened my experience)
|
| I sometimes accidentally open the 'modern' view and it
| feels so bloated. Everything is so against intuition, it
| feels like someone's fresh-out-of-marketing-school design.
| singhrac wrote:
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| I've been getting lots of extra spam and it particularly
| seems like anything with "invoice" in the text won't get
| sent to spam.
| lrem wrote:
| Funny, I have neither. But think your analysis makes
| sense too and I just got lucky.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| 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.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > Surely they see it.
|
| Do you use the Report Spam button? Because that is how
| they see it.
| ectopod wrote:
| I use Thunderbird. Does gmail take notice of me moving
| messages to the spam folder?
|
| (Question not directed at you specifically.)
| dotancohen wrote:
| As a Thunderbird user too,I would love to know the answer
| as well.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Every damn time. But until the issue is resolved, I will
| assume that button is just a NOP designed to make people
| feel good.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| 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.)
| cal85 wrote:
| When?
| butterNaN wrote:
| I switched to basic HTML gmail the moment it tried to
| predict what I wanted to type (incorrectly, I should add).
|
| I sometimes accidentally open the 'modern' view and it
| feels so bloated. Everything is so against intuition, it
| feels like someone's fresh-out-of-marketing-school design.
| v3ss0n wrote:
| Paul Buchheit was core developer of gmail , who left gmail
| in 2006 - where its become shitty afterwards. He founded
| friendfeed and then got acquired by Facebook - and he left
| facebook to become angel investor / he is also main Partner
| of YC . he invested in many great startups like Twitch . On
| the opensource part , he build tornado web framework which
| is really important async framework for python ecosystem.
| Jupyter is built on top of tornado . He is active in
| HackerNews .
| sosborn wrote:
| It always amuses me that we try to complicate things that
| should just be a simple list ordered by date.
| bambax wrote:
| > _just revert back to organizing emails by date of
| arrival_
|
| You can choose to do that: Settings / General /
| Conversation view off
|
| It's so much better to simply have emails in the order they
| arrive instead of hunting them down in "conversations".
| ghaff wrote:
| I understand that emails can get buried but threaded
| views are _so_ much better for me (especially at work)
| than my inbox being buried by conversations /threads that
| I have zero interest in. My alternative would probably be
| to more aggressively filter but that would effectively
| mean I never even saw lots of things I might actually
| care about.
| samstave wrote:
| Dont forget Goog literally owened the anti spam industry with
| gmail after their integrating POSTINI purchase in like ~~2006
|
| And now in 2022 any gmailinbox is fn full of spam...
| lstodd wrote:
| Because you have to support products, esp. antispam, while
| goog is generaly known for doing the other thing.
| samstave wrote:
| Uh, they literally paid MILLIONS for the antispam company
| POSTINI and thats what the original anti-spam features
| for GMAIL are based on... in the last 18 months or
| something, google apparently deleted that tech from their
| stack, I posted about this when I first started having so
| much spam inbox my gmail....
|
| So yeah - THEY _supported_ the product by paying millions
| for it...
|
| Then they did "the other thing"
| grandrew wrote:
| Thank you for brilliant comment highligthing the OSS issues.
|
| But I believe you're missing the main point that OP is making:
| OSS will _statistically_ dominate every single niche.
|
| There are just more reasons why non-OSS software would cease to
| exist - so eventually Inkscape will become a de-facto standard
| for Illustrator things; Blender will become de-facto standard
| of all 3D-Max things; OBS will become a de-facto standard of
| all Macromedia Flash Broadcast ... oh wait ... did that happen
| already?
| ksec wrote:
| >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
| everyone.
|
| If we look at the all the success we have in Open Source, most
| of them are not even on the list. SQLite, MySQL / Postgres, all
| the Networking Libraries, WebKit / Blink, FFmpeg, GNU Compiler
| / LLVM, Apache / Nginx etc, etc. Not only are they the dominant
| position or with substantial market share, they are also all
| infrastructure related.
| maire wrote:
| 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 Blender
| are targeted at artists and not developers. The author assumes
| the awesomeness of Blender is inevitable. But GIMP is pretty
| bad and shows no evidence that it is getting better. Yet - when
| major animation studios decided to adopt Blender they dedicated
| UX resources to Blender to make it more usable for artists.
|
| When the developer is not the user, you need that extra step.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > 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
| thing you are working on, your job is to serve the user.
|
| To be fair, this is not a struggle unique to engineers, far
| from it. Professions, that is very adamant about conveying
| this during training are teachers, therapists (and I
| explicitly don't include physicians, although they can be)
| and, to a wildly varying degree because of what the job means
| nowadays, designers.
|
| People working in most other professions default suck at
| this.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Next I want to see the TTASC. Time till Amazon SaaS Clone.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > It won't happen overnight, it will start out as a poor
| alternative, but slowly growing to become the robust and cheap
| (in fact, free!) solution that everyone uses.
|
| I'm not sure about that: plenty of people/orgs are okay with
| using software that someone else will be responsible for running
| and managing and therefore won't be interested in self-hosted
| offerings (though one could feasibly argue that there could be
| managed open source offerings).
|
| In my org, I offered to help with self-hosted
| Mattermost/Rocket.Chat or another chat solution, since that would
| allow for a centralized platform for all of the company
| developers to get in touch and organically self-organize into
| interest groups, thus easing the friction of communication.
|
| And yet, nobody was interested in setting aside the resources for
| an instance and getting everyone on board, so the plan never
| materialized, even though I also run my own instances for
| personal projects etc. So in the end people stuck around on
| multiple distributed Skype/Slack/Teams and possibly other chat
| solutions, it all being a bit too fragmented and sometimes there
| even being message history limits to deal with.
| orbital223 wrote:
| 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.
| fsflover wrote:
| Mastodon technically works pretty well but lacks sufficient
| marketing and suffers from the network effect.
| zupa-hu wrote:
| Lol what a nugget! Summarizes the article pretty well.
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| Assertion 1: "All software will be open source, " Assertion 2:
| "and no one will make money with software."
|
| The data on the page only demonstrates the first assertion, at
| best. Even that should come with a caveat of distinction between
| the software itself and the business model around it that makes
| it sticky.
|
| There is absolutely no reason why open source software couldn't
| make money.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| This rings true for all my personal products. Last one I built
| and soft launched quietly. Then within a year there was a FOSS
| project covering the same killer feature, that none of my
| commercial competitors had (or have yet). Previous product had a
| FOSS alternative within six months.
| Axsuul wrote:
| Lots of wrong assumptions here but the most egregious of them
| all:
|
| > If your closed software demands $1000 from my pocket but I can
| make do with a free and open source alternative, I will choose
| the open one.
|
| Sorry but software purchasing decisions aren't simply based on
| cost and never will.
| fsloth wrote:
| Indeed! Especially big corps seem to prefer software with clear
| licensing terms and a capability to license software for
| organization at scale. In that competition the software with
| better licensing options win, not the cheaper one necessarily.
|
| And the cheaper software is cheaper only if you apply no cost
| to retraining, taking the product in use in your existing
| production pipeline and so on.
|
| This writing is not very well put together and ignores several
| facets of large corporations.
| donio wrote:
| Netscape Navigator -> Mosaic: -692 days Slack -> IRC: -9102
| days
|
| Yeah, I know that there are obvious feature differences but the
| list also has entries like BitKeeper -> Git and ManyCam -> OBS
| which are just as skewed.
| [deleted]
| parksy wrote:
| 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.
| woleium wrote:
| it happens the other way too. I used to contribute to a small ssl
| VPN project (adito) that was 'aquired' by barracuda networks. It
| was forked and picked up by OpenVPN (as openvpn-als) but
| development stopped. I believe it's still updated internally and
| forms part of Barracudas firewall offering.
| balaji1 wrote:
| There is a reverse transition to monetize the open-source
| versions with a hosted-service also. Lot more products being
| built "in the open" these days.
|
| Anyway, it is kinda interesting to see that it doesn't take long
| for copies of a new tech to show up. Zero-to-one seems sporadic,
| but immediately we see the market replicate it.
|
| Recently seen with something seemingly complex like DALL-E.
| Didn't take long for the comparables to crop up. Some of them
| must be open-source, I am not aware of that aspect.
|
| Apple Airpods was another one. Almost within a year, there were
| other earphones available in that form-factor.
| rajko_rad wrote:
| Wow this is awesome data!
|
| I wrote about this trend at some point last year btw:
| https://rajko-rad.medium.com/the-rise-of-open-source-challen...
| netmonk wrote:
| 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 ?
| opan wrote:
| 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
| your friend a CD with Emacs on it for $5. It is not forbidden.
| jldugger wrote:
| what happens when the trend crosses into negative territory? Do
| we start calling it "time to commercialization?"
| emrah wrote:
| Being an alternative does not mean one product will replace
| another. GIMP will never replace or kill Photoshop. It will be an
| alternative sure, like tea, coffee, beer are
| alternatives/substitutes for water.
|
| GIMP has sort of similar functionality but nowhere near the same
| polish or community or marketing or simply $$$ behind it.
|
| OSS can only kill and replace closed/paid products where it can
| match the factors I mentioned above that goes beyond functional
| parity.
| albertop wrote:
| I have yet to see open source alternative with UX that is better
| than original.
| tuatoru wrote:
| bash(1) has a better UX than the original sh(1).
| jefftk wrote:
| Firefox > IE (introduced tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking)
| landofredwater wrote:
| I'd argue in favor of Blender. While complex, it uses very
| strong features and gives you lots of freedom to do as you
| wish.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Blender is not a clone of anything, it started as commercial
| product.
| newbieuser wrote:
| I don't understand what you want to explain in the monetization
| part. For example, things like hasura, supabase are open source.
| but they can make money by selling their own services. and there
| are other examples like this. I think the author's point of view
| is too romantic
| kybernetyk wrote:
| Many of those alternatives aren't really an alternative a
| professional would use.
| bawolff wrote:
| The table is questionable.
|
| Firefox isnt an alternative to netscape, its literally a fork.
|
| Why is 7zip the alternative to winzip and not gzip?
|
| Etc
| peeters wrote:
| It'd be interesting to follow up each of these entries with what
| _actually_ superceded the original in terms of market share.
|
| "Original"/OSS/Current:
|
| Office/OpenOffice/Google Docs
|
| WinZip/7-zip/Whatever archive utility is bundled with your OS
|
| Windows Media Player/VLC/Online Streaming
|
| Netscape/Firefox/Chrome
|
| In all but a few of the other cases (e.g. OBS), the original
| hasn't lost an ounce of market share to the "alternative".
|
| I guess what I'm saying is the data seems to show that the threat
| to paid software isn't OSS alternatives, it's commercial
| competition.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Open Cascade is not an (open source) alternative to AutoCAD. Also
| there is none. (people talk about OpenSCAD and FreeCAD but
| neither of them are comparable to AutoCAD).
| aothms wrote:
| True. Came here to say that. QCAD is somewhat of an alternative
| to AutoCAD. OpenCASCADE is a foss alternative to e.g ACIS or
| Parasolid.
|
| It's potentially important as there aren't that many projects
| from the 80s in the list, so maybe has an impact on the trend
| line.
|
| (a trend line that would look similar if you look at time
| between proprietary alternatives I guess... a fact of the
| increasing amount of time spent on software engineering?)
| fsloth wrote:
| Yes, this comparison is extremely weird. The author did not
| really do his homework. It's like saying libpng is a
| replacement for Photoshop.
|
| To clarify: Autocad is a CAD suite used for 2D and 3D drawing
| production. In addition to that, it is used as an
| implementation platform for a large number of third party
| domain specific software for engineering disciplines that need
| more intelligence on top of the basic Autocad - HVAC planning,
| civil construction and so on.
|
| OpenCascade is a geometry modeling kernel - a c++ library with
| no "end user" gui functionality or database. Yes, such a thing
| is a critical part in a software like Autocad, but only one
| small part.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I feel like there's one area where open-source cannot universally
| replace closed-source: complex products that need to be extremely
| polished. Some people might be able to swap, but not everyone. An
| example is the desktop: I've used Linux for over a decade and
| still do but I recently added an M1 Mac and the hardware+software
| is just so much better for certain kinds of content creation.
| Video editing is another. I've tried a dozen video editors and
| while Shotcut is one of the best open-source ones, it's blown
| away by Davinci Resolve.
|
| Raw photo editing is another area. Open-source has achieved some
| success here with darktable, and I personally use that, but it
| certainly can't (easily) replace some closed-source alternatives
| for everyone, especially in some more commercial photography
| settings.
| wellbehaved wrote:
| I think open source is a kind of compensation for the fact that
| our political economy doesn't create meritocracies, analogous to
| how when one part of your body is injured some other part
| compensates. The compensation isn't "good" in the sense that it's
| bad to be injured and therefore to need it, but without the
| compensation things would be even worse.
| heisenbit wrote:
| The analysis has a gap when it comes to products vs. solutions. A
| lot of problems these days are not solved by a big product but by
| integrating smaller often open source building blocks. Solutions
| that preempt products (or are never turned into products). The
| products of old and the market they lived in were different. It
| is not just that open source grew with respect to capabilities -
| the other side shrank too.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Not on that list, an actual open-source alternative to Confluence
| and JIRA, and all of its features/plugins :(
|
| i.e. Agile mode board, sprints, multi-project/issue keys,
| timesheets/time tracking, source control integration, epics and
| release management
|
| Yes, some exist, but our experience is that practically none are
| as easy to use or feature complete as Confluence and JIRA.
|
| (i.e. Not in the way that GitLab could be classed as a feature
| complete alternative to GitHub)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I was just talking to another ex-Googler today, and he has a
| simple explanation for why products keep getting worse
| (especially Google's, but not just them):
|
| _PMs gotta get promoted_
|
| New PM inherits a successful product. They can't get promoted if
| all they do is keep it healthy and growing. No, they have to make
| a radical change, even if the product doesn't need it, and in
| fact their radical change makes it worse.
|
| I could present examples of "fixing what isn't broken" but it
| would probably just be a dive into the deep end.
|
| In any case, though, Mr. Staltz is wrong. Making a product usable
| is an art, and OSS projects very seldom have it. There is no one
| (a PM, oddly enough) to say "no, your new feature is stupid and
| doesn't fit with the rest of the product."
|
| As other people have noted, this applies mainly to user-facing
| products. The developers do an 80% job and then split, and no one
| wants to do the shit work that comprises the other 20%.
|
| This is not to defend stupid, greedy companies like Adobe, by the
| way. But yes, GIMP does suck, as many people have pointed out.
| cristiioan wrote:
| The way he calculated this duration is wrong. He associated
| FossCord as a Discord alternative, but Matrix was the true
| discord alternative.
| gregmac wrote:
| > 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 for free? Are there random people that will
| suddenly develop an interest in figuring out how to automate
| filling out a bunch of Mississippi state government permit
| request forms, or how to convert an obsolete file format that's
| only used in the gas industry to another obsolete file format and
| FTP it somewhere, or how to convert customer orders to a cut
| lists used by a multi-million dollar industrial machine of which
| less than 100 exist in the world?
|
| Are the customers (businesses) going to suddenly decide to hire
| up an engineering team and build this themselves, at probably
| higher cost than they pay today and definitely at way higher
| risk? Maybe they'll get together with a bunch of businesses with
| similar needs -- aka their competitors -- and pool their
| resources to build something?
|
| I think none of this will happen -- or will happen in such
| exceedingly rare circumstances it's not worth considering.
|
| Which means I'm pretty confident to say there will _always_ be
| proprietary software.
| bruce511 wrote:
| I completely agree. We operate in a space where we rent out our
| proprietary software to businesses to solve a mundane business
| requirement. We wrote our own software.
|
| We compete with other companies, some have their own (or some
| exclusivity) others make use of a generic package (closed
| source, but they supply anyone who wants to be in this space.)
|
| Yes, having unique software means we can do things others
| can't. But really we're selling "the whole package" of which
| the software is only a tiny part. Mostly our customers are
| paying for service, support, statutory updates and so on. They
| are paying us to be around when they need us. That may be
| tomorrow, or 10 years from now, but our existence ultimately
| matters to them.
|
| Maybe one day there will be viable OSS in our space, it may
| already exist. But if it does, no-one here is selling it, or
| supporting it. If someone does make it we, and any number of
| our existing compeditors, can happily pivot to it, with our
| existing sales and support infrastructure.
|
| It turns out that having a unique product helps our sales
| process. We can differentiate on more than just price. But
| ultimately customers want support not source code.
| musicale wrote:
| Most app store revenue comes from games. Some games (such as
| some puzzle games) are easy to clone and replace, but many are
| not.
|
| More energy seems to be put into emulation of proprietary games
| than creation of new open source games.
| melagonster wrote:
| game is a artwork, artists don't work like programmers, so
| currently open source mode don't work for them.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Because users actually pay for games.
| zaroth wrote:
| I'm confused...
|
| There are no rows in the table for proprietary software that
| hasn't been OSA'd, and the rows that are there take no head of
| market size or adoption rates of the alternative.
|
| Therefore the chart can only possibly trend downwards because the
| X axis is a date from the past until 'today' and the y axis is
| the number of days since that date that something pretty
| arbitrary happened.
|
| Think of the X axis as "Days Since 1970" (0 - ~11,500). The
| maximum Y value is bounded by y = 11,500 - x.
| indus wrote:
| Whoever the eff wrote this is an effing genius. I have been
| thinking about this for sometime how majority of the saas
| businesses will be taken over by oss. Saw this first hand in
| server software. But the analysis done and the tabulated view and
| chart blew my mind.
|
| Very well articulated.
| egypturnash wrote:
| It has been about 35 years since Illustrator was released and
| IMHO it still does a lot of things that Inkscape can't do. "Time
| Till High Quality Open Source Alternative" for that one is about
| 12.7k days and counting.
|
| I also don't know a single professional artist who uses Gimp
| instead of Photoshop. Krita's gotten some traction; Wikipedia
| says that one was founded on June 21, 2005, which is about 15y
| after Photoshop.
| 3np wrote:
| I like to think of this as a paradigm shift from businesses
| focusing on vertical integration where the same entity develops
| and maintains client- and server-side software and infrastructure
| and acts as the sole service provider, to a separation of service
| providers and software maintainers. It's a natural consequence of
| specialization and commoditization. We're already seeing this in
| cloud computing and databases. Case in point from OP:
| Dokku/Heroku. There is no reason why Dokku should have been a
| threat to Heroku. Ideally open-source tooling should only serve
| to strengthen someone like Heroku (whether they would have
| continued as a PaaS or pivoted to selling their software or other
| services around it). For a more recent example, I think the
| window for introducing another Netlify under the same model on
| the same scale is closing.
|
| This is not bad news for business per se, it just requires a
| different strategy. If your service is solid, you should just be
| grateful that someone else can provide client software
| accommodating for users needs you may be neglecting or lacking
| the resources to accommodate. If you're a software builder it's a
| win to have a flourishing ecosystem of service providers for
| users to choose from, increasing the usefulness of your software
| and widening your market through the efforts of others.
|
| If you have a proprietary API (openly documented or not) time is
| ticking.
|
| Rent-seekers will struggle as their capabilities to hold
| customers hostage weaken. Businesses focusing on providing
| customer value (actual experienced value) should do well as long
| as they match their niche with their strengths.
|
| Look at Tailscale. I think they get this.
| fallat wrote:
| Nice to see some data 2 years later to back this up https://ecc-
| comp.blogspot.com/2020/08/80-of-software-is-usel...
| IncRnd wrote:
| The first example in that doc is Sublime Text. "Unfortunately
| the only thing going for Sublime was that it was first-to-
| market with a few novel ideas, most notably multiple cursor
| editing." That was clearly written by someone who hadn't used
| Sublime.
|
| Then Github is mentioned as making money from the data they
| collect. You need to understand Github is Microsoft. From our
| perspective they make money from the enterprise agreements for
| security and code analysis they offer through Github. That is
| what pays for people's free use.
|
| Finally, the article closes with Word and Excel being useless.
| As much as I dislike those programs, they work. None of the
| free alternatives can share files without there eventually
| being unfixable file format problems. When working with your
| boss, you need to use the same program in order to share files.
| None of the alternatives work.
| zvr wrote:
| On the first row of the table, the Open Source Alternative to
| Unix should be BSD Unix, released in 1979.
| Gigachad wrote:
| >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 the form of hosts and surrounding
| tooling like Github and paid git guis.
|
| If anything I think we have moved backwards. We are no longer
| looking at making copies of grep and dd. 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. You need teams of people
| working on out there new and untested ideas pushing the state of
| the art for image editing. While the alternatives are still
| trying to catch up to 2015 UI design patterns.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Well on one hand OSS did make Blender which is moving towards a
| defacto standard in game making at least.
|
| Otoh nothing prohibits another OSS software appearing and
| stealing an OSS incumbent's thunder. See Krita and Gimp.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Krita is nothing like GIMP
| Ygg2 wrote:
| To an extent, yes. But as someone who likes to draw and not
| edit pictures, they fill a similar niche.
|
| I mean I heard people use Blender as a Gimp replacement.
| Because it can edit huge number of files in a batch.
| kyriakos wrote:
| People will use anything instead of gimp to be honest.
| Haven't tried it in a while but everytime I did in the
| past I can't help but question if it's developers
| actually use their own software.
| lvass wrote:
| Not me. Whenever I try alternatives, I can't help but
| question if people who use GIMP alternatives actually
| tried reading the GIMP manual.
| kyriakos wrote:
| If you need the manual it most probably means the UI
| needs improvement.
| lvass wrote:
| Only under the assumption they're designed for usage
| without the manual. I understand most things are but they
| definitely don't have to be. GIMP unfortunately may not
| be particularly explicit about this but having all users
| read the manual feels very much intended.
| Aeolun wrote:
| In a good way. I've certainly completely replaced Gimp with
| Krita for my uses.
| jwmcq wrote:
| I think it's also worth noting that OSS did not 'make'
| Blender initially - it was a closed-source application. It's
| a resounding OSS success these days, but had already been
| 'productised' before the the release of the source.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Krita is great but has a different use case than gimp.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Blender was a commercial product, whose main users kept
| supporting after it went open source.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| And early Blender sucked ass compared to today. While it
| starting as a commercial product might have helped at
| start, right now it's no longer the case.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Because the commercial partners cared enough to keep
| putting the money to further develop it.
|
| Blender always had a professional userbase around it,
| unlike the Photoshop wannabe competition.
| bambax wrote:
| > _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.
| Gigachad wrote:
| 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.
| bambax wrote:
| > _Nothing is ever feature complete_
|
| Of course. I meant it's suitable for many, many purposes,
| which explains why it has millions of users.
| eru wrote:
| > If anything I think we have moved backwards. We are no longer
| looking at making copies of grep and dd. 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. [...]
|
| I'd see that as making progress, not moving backwards!
|
| It means open source has solved the 'easy' cases, and only the
| harder ones remain.
|
| (It's a bit like after humans have visited the moon,
| complaining that going to Mars will require more effort; and
| saying that this means we have moved backwards.)
| 3np wrote:
| 100%. That the author think it's "backwards" that they can't
| run a sustainable business by copying what's already been
| made but need to put in some actual work (and that building
| profitable software inherently must involves AI/ML experts
| and cloud specialist) speaks more about OPs bias than about
| actual requirements. Not meaning to point fingers at them
| specifically too much; they're most likely in a bubble where
| these views are implicitly assumed.
|
| As for the specific example of Photoshop, well, yeah.. Adobe
| has put in at least that much work and resources behind it,
| so what do you expect is required to get a fair fight?
| Photoshop was an incredibly complex and refined piece of
| software with immense work behind it before they moved to the
| cloud. 99% you wouldn't pull that off in 2008 either. That
| GIMP is still mostly unheard of outside of enthusiast circles
| and never posed any threat to Adobe shows that it takes way
| more than a handful of skilled devs.
|
| > Copies of grep
|
| https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep started in 2016 and
| went stable in 2019. It's not being sold as a SaaS
| subscription because why would it?
|
| I often hear complaints about entitled users but I get some
| "entitled tech founder" vibes here, as if not being able to
| sustain on rent-seeking behavior is a defect.
| 3np wrote:
| Looks like I conflated two different perspectives above. Oh
| well. Take it for what it is.
| mattkrause wrote:
| As a counter-example, the Affinity family of Photo, Designer,
| and Publisher seem to be doing pretty well as a partial
| _commercial_ replacement for Abobe CC. I don 't know how many
| Serif employs, but I'd be surprised if it were thousands. It's
| true that Affinity does a lot less, especially preproduction
| stuff, but a lot of "light" Adobe users seem happy with it.
|
| As for grep, there are plenty of newer attempts, like ripgrep,
| ack, and ag, too.
| [deleted]
| imgabe wrote:
| The actual alternative to Photoshop for most people who just
| need to do simple edits ends up being photopea or another web
| app (there's at least one other popular one I forget the name
| of). Most people don't have the patience to install GIMP and
| figure out the interface.
| bredren wrote:
| Yes, the photoshop web clone photopea is remarkably good for
| quick and dirty.
|
| It has all the old hot keys and export (download in a format)
| is fast.
|
| I would not consider gimp over that site at this point. But
| maybe if the site started restrictions or forcing payments I
| would.
|
| More likely an os web app alternative would take the lead.
| nine_k wrote:
| Presence of an alternative [?] the alternative replacing the
| incumbent.
|
| Linux has not completely replaced Windows or macOS, it even has
| not replaced FreeBSD. But having it as an alternative, even
| back in 1990s when it was not yet mature, was very important.
|
| Firefox has not replaced MSIE or Chrome, but its presence is
| very, very important for the entire Web, to my mind.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| There's a reliable test for predicting the success of failure
| of open source software: "Does it directly interact with
| users?"
|
| If the answer is yes, OSS has mostly been an alternative option
| but not the first choice. (With all due respect and deference
| to the work put in by OSS GUI teams!)
|
| If the answer is no, and especially if it's a shared need but
| not the primary product (e.g. kernel, web server, intermediate
| processing step), then OSS has taken over the world.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Not totally, not till Oracle has been tipped into the dustbin
| of history. (Come the day!)
|
| I think Cisco still uses proprietary software too.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Fair! Although I've never worked with a shop that was not-
| Oracle and migrating to Oracle. Sadly, there's the long
| tail of places with existing, business critical Oracle use.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Anyone that wants top tier RDMS, it nice graphical
| debuggers for stored procedures, integration of Java and
| .NET into the database, distributed transactions, raw
| file system accesses, web services on the DB layer, among
| several other features, besides Oracle, there is only MS
| SQL Server and the RDMS owned by IBM like DB 2 and
| Informix.
|
| MySQL and Postgres are kind of nice, but not really the
| same league at tooling level.
| bruce511 wrote:
| This is completely in line with the premise above.
|
| If the database is primarily a data store, unseen by the
| end user, then Postgress, Firebird etc are fine. If
| however the database is an active part of the development
| stack, being used by lots of "users", writing new code
| etc, then commercial offerings with better tooling win.
| nine_k wrote:
| With Oracle's strong ties with government structures, it's
| unlikely that it will be gone in the next 30 years.
|
| I'd say that the cutting point is when no _new_ project
| considers Oracle as a viable tool. This time has largely
| come already.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. Open source software people very rarely do good
| graphical user interfaces. Unclear why this is so. But it is.
| medoc wrote:
| For making a good GUI, the tech guys need to be ordered
| around by non-tech guys who think like, or talk to, regular
| users and know what is needed. Tech guys don't like this,
| so someone needs to pay for their suffering.
| einpoklum wrote:
| You have clearly not see the user interface of most (as
| opposed to the most popular) pieces of closed-source
| software.
| noirbot wrote:
| That's not really a rebuttal though. 90% of all UX can be
| bad, but it's still notable if 99% of OSS UX is bad.
|
| Actually needing to sell your product eventually/get
| people to use it seems to be a fairly necessary part of
| ending up with a good UX.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I suspect Dijkstra made the relevant distinction in a
| different context: the open source process is geared to
| providing correct software, not pleasant software.
|
| > _The pleasantness problem deals with the question how
| satisfactory a system meeting a given functional
| specification would be; the correctness problem deals with
| the question whether a given system meets that functional
| specification. The correctness problem being an entirely
| technical one, the functional specification can provide
| strong heuristic guidance for the system designer._
| EGreg wrote:
| Yes you're right. But OSS opens up a free market of vendors.
| Consider how Wordpress powers 40% of all websites in the
| world. The website owners pay hosts etc. to have full control
| and they arent locked into a monopoly vendor, but end users
| just use the stuff.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| I never considered this differentiator before, but it makes
| sense.
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| This is very simple to understand: in the long run, price tends
| to marginal cost of production. Open source represents the
| logical endpoint: since marginal cost of software is ~0, the
| endpoint is something with price ~0. SaaS is a response, but
| open source is already chipping away at the low end.
|
| As for the general thought about experts, consider web
| browsers. Advancing the state of the art is extremely
| expensive, yet the browser vendors are more or less forced to
| give it away for free. The browsers that either charged money
| or weren't open source ... for the most part died out.
| jahewson wrote:
| > in the long run, price tends to marginal cost of production
|
| Ah but this principle applies to commodity markets, where
| prices rising above the marginal level would prompt an
| increase in production from competitors or new entrants to
| the market.
|
| Software is not a commodity though, nobody other than Adobe
| makes Photoshop, we can't increase production of Photoshop.
| People can create competing products, of course, but that's
| just a regular competitive market. This is also why movies
| and ebooks don't cost $0.
|
| > browser vendors are more or less forced to give it away for
| free
|
| Yes but that's not because of the market, the idea of giving
| it away free was to distort the market. It was done to crush
| Netscape and it worked. Now it's done to grab as many
| eyeballs as possible and keep competitors off your turf. I
| think it's possible that we'll return to paid web browsers
| when the interests of the vendors and the users are more
| closely aligned - in a sense Safari and Edge are already
| there, as they're both priced-in to their respective OS's.
| musicale wrote:
| > It was done to crush Netscape and it worked
|
| It would have been interesting to see how things would have
| turned out had Microsoft been able to continue integrating
| the OS and web browser.
|
| At this point I expect most users expect the OS to include
| a web browser and would consider it deficient otherwise.
| I'm not sure if it's even possible to replace Chrome with
| Firefox on ChromeOS.
| eru wrote:
| You can install Firefox on ChromeOS. (At least I've done
| it on ChromeOS Flex.) However, just like Windows 98 used
| Internet Explorer for some of its internals (eg the
| 'live' Desktop), so does ChromeOS use Chrome for eg
| tweaking the settings.
| musicale wrote:
| > the idea of giving it away free was to distort the
| market. It was done to crush Netscape
|
| Oh this is interesting:
|
| > [Netscape Navigator] Version 3.0 was also available in a
| "Gold" version which featured a WYSIWYG HTML editor (later
| added to Netscape Communicator as a standard feature), and
| was sold as retail software for profit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_(web_browser)
| cowtools wrote:
| You only have to build the alternative once. Yes, there have
| been some areas where proprietary software has held its ground,
| but has done just that- it has not replaced free software in
| the areas that it has control over.
|
| The takeover of free software may be slow, but it is one-
| directional.
| glasshug wrote:
| I wish this were true! But keeping your software current in
| 2022 is an continuous project. UIs improve, platforms shift,
| features expand, vulns appear, needs change, server bills
| need to be paid.
| cowtools wrote:
| I think this is a self-aggrandizing myth that is common in
| forums like HN with lots of programmers and designers:
|
| - UI's usually do not improve. They "improve" by making
| subjective changes for the benefit of the maker (often at
| the cost of the user).
|
| - Platforms are constantly shifting when they are owned by
| corporations. At first, businesses will penetrate the
| market by creating a competitive platform. Once their
| platform has reached critical market share, they will
| switch to milking their users who are now trapped due to
| vendor lock-in. This forces users of proprietary software
| to constantly jump ship in order to get a good deal.
|
| - Features sometimes expand, but most apps will reach a
| point where it no longer makes sense to add additional
| features. In the free-software world, we generally try to
| make an ecosystem of programs that work together: if a
| single program is too complex, its features may be divided
| into several smaller programs. In the corporate world, a
| single program may be bloated and expanded long past the
| point at which additional complexity will serve the user-
| so long as developers can continue to invent new ways to
| extract money, data, etc from their users.
|
| - New vulnerabilities may be uncovered, but generally
| vulnerabilities are only added when the complexity of
| program increases. Vulnerabilities don't just appear out of
| nowhere. If you write a program, it doesn't just become
| more vulnerable over time just by merit of being old.
|
| - Server bills usually need to be paid because people have
| inserted themselves as middlemen. If the internet was
| designed in a way that did not require paying a
| racketeering fee for DNS, PKI, etc. then we would see a lot
| of decentralized alternatives to "essential" services.
|
| It's hard for me to entirely put into words how flawed your
| statement is. If you have time, you may want to check out a
| book called "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" by David Graeber
| (https://libgen.gs/edition.php?id=5852679). It might give
| you a new perspective on the software industry.
| 3np wrote:
| I recently spent some time on reviving an old (FLOSS, all
| server-side, the only UI being CLI and an HTTP API)
| nodejs 8 software built mostly according to what was
| considered best practice at the time. I can confidently
| say you're missing important nuance here.
|
| A counter-argument to this could be "most people were
| doing it wrong at the time and those best-practices
| proved to be not very sustainable so your old software
| was probably garbage already" but at that point we're
| entering the realm of dismissing reality.
| johnfn wrote:
| 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 likely to have the hard-earned
| experience!
|
| I mean, just look at HN for examples. Quite literally
| yesterday it happened again: Heroku decided to turn off
| all old free apps. That's a whole bunch of my old apps
| that are about to deprecate and break unless I do some
| work on them.
|
| > Features sometimes expand, but most apps will reach a
| point where it no longer makes sense to add additional
| features.
|
| I think this is overly idealistic, or perhaps limited to
| too small of a problem space. If your software stops
| adding features, it will quickly be out-competed by
| software which does have new features that improve
| productivity. I suppose you could argue that some apps
| are "finished", but I tend to see those as a rather small
| subset of all apps - things like single-use command-line
| utilities, say, like grep and awk. It's hard for me to
| fathom Photoshop ever being finished - until you're
| beaming ideas directly from brain to canvas, there's
| always the possibility that new features can save more
| time[1].
|
| > Vulnerabilities don't just appear out of nowhere
|
| But this is exactly what vulnerabilities do. One day,
| there isn't Heartbleed. The next day there is. One day,
| your Java dependencies are fine. The next day, log4j is
| broken for everyone on the internet. If you're not on
| call to solve problems like these, no one is going to use
| your app.
|
| I don't really understand how you can say "[a program]
| doesn't just become more vulnerable over time just by
| merit of being old". This is exactly what happens to any
| program with dependencies.
|
| > Server bills usually need to be paid because people
| have inserted themselves as middlemen
|
| People have inserted themselves as middlemen because
| servers require upkeep, and upkeeping a server takes the
| time of an experienced professional. They need to be
| patched for vulns (again), maybe you need to swap out
| your SSD because it finally ran out of writes, or any in
| a litany of other problems.
|
| [1]: Then again, with DALL-E, maybe this is happening
| sooner than we think - but that's beside the point.
| archagon wrote:
| I question the utility of most features Adobe adds to PS
| these days; but in any case, the problem is easily solved
| by building a robust plugin system and distributing the
| work.
| melagonster wrote:
| I had found some good new features in Microsoft office
| 365, I guess the sapce between now and finishing still
| big.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| Ah, shucks. Let's not argue. You're both right. Can we
| embrace great points on both sides without strong
| diageement?
| johnfn wrote:
| Haha, you know what, that's pretty fair.
| cowtools wrote:
| >I mean, just look at HN for examples. Quite literally
| yesterday it happened again: Heroku decided to turn off
| all old free apps. That's a whole bunch of my old apps
| that are about to deprecate and break unless I do some
| work on them.
|
| Yeah, pretty short-sighted of you to go out of your way
| to design those systems in a way that is dependent on a
| single company hosting it.
|
| >I suppose you could argue that some apps are "finished",
| but I tend to see those as a rather small subset of all
| apps - things like single-use command-line utilities,
| say, like grep and awk. It's hard for me to fathom
| Photoshop ever being finished
|
| In an ideal computing environment, the functionalities of
| a single bloated program like adobe photoshop are
| completely encompassed by an environment of general-
| purpose utilities in a way that is analogous to unix
| shell programs that can interact to perform a variety of
| tasks.
|
| Modern operating systems are intentionally designed in a
| way that promotes the commercialization of software. For
| example, why is it that all third-party software on iOS
| or android is packaged into distinct, sandboxed "apps"
| each with their own accompanying icons and whatnot? It's
| clear that the ability for these "apps" to perform any
| real inter-process communication is hampered, because the
| boundaries of the apps represent the boundaries of
| different competing commercial entities. It is sort of
| like conway's law, but in reverse: by enforcing a certain
| structure on software that is distributed, you are
| selecting for a particular corporate development
| structure. This analogy goes much deeper than what I can
| current find the words for. The whole system is quite
| insidiously woven together.
|
| It is impossible to run any sort of background process
| (for example, a daemon) in a way that is transparent to
| other running processes, but it does allow apps to make
| outgoing connections. This makes the user dependent on an
| intermediate to provide inter-app communication as a sort
| of internet-based service.
|
| So I hear you say that software has to compete with the
| endless "upgrades" of its competitors. I think we have
| almost never seen a market in which free software based
| on the unix philosophy has actually competed on its own
| terms. What we've seen is a market where free software
| competes on a commercial basis- in producing a distinct,
| marketable product (as opposed to an environment of
| inter-working tools) that is comparable to an existing
| product such that consumers are familiar with it. The
| unix shell environment is a rare example of an actually
| good idea coming out of the commercial software, and it's
| a major foothold for free software that has continued
| that legacy.
|
| >But this is exactly what vulnerabilities do. One day,
| there isn't Heartbleed. The next day there is.
|
| If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and no one
| hears it, does it make a sound? If there's a bug in
| software but no one uncovers it, is it a vulnerability?
| Apparently not according to you.
|
| There would be no heartbleed if there was no
| implementation of the mostly-useless heartbeat faculty.
| There would be no log4jshell if there was no
| implementation of the bloated JNDI crap. You are correct,
| this is exactly what happens when programmers include
| many useless, bloated, and unvetted dependencies in their
| project.
|
| Here is the way I see it: At some point you will reach a
| point in your work where the utility-to-complexity
| tradeoff will taper off. There is an ideal version of
| every program that is bug-free and at the plateu of this
| utility-to-complexity curve. The purpose of all
| programming is to get close enough to the ideal system
| and finish- to make something that works well reliably.
|
| Saying that one must continuously revise a program
| forever to account for new features or vulnerabilities or
| service providers is like saying that you should
| continuously revise a book forever because you need to
| add another chapter or fix another typo or move to
| another publisher because Heroku stopped printing your
| book. The goal of writing is to produce a useful-enough
| book built on sound knowledge, if you are producing
| something that you think constantly deserves to be
| revised then you are incompetent- either because you
| cannot recognize a finished product or because you cannot
| produce one.
|
| The reason why commercial software is often updated with
| useless and inane features (much like a college
| textbook!) obviously serves a much more sinister motive
| than what you've described here.
|
| >People have inserted themselves as middlemen because
| servers require upkeep, and up-keeping a server takes the
| time of an experienced professional. They need to be
| patched for vulns (again), maybe you need to swap out
| your SSD because it finally ran out of writes, or any in
| a litany of other problems.
|
| I see the fact that a service is critically dependent on
| a single server or maintainer as a design failure.
| Software should allow users to be more self-sufficient,
| not less. These centralized systems make you reliant on
| some sysadmin or someone who essentially performs a
| "useless job". Check out that book I linked earlier. It's
| an interesting read.
|
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something,
| when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
| bruce511 wrote:
| >> the fact that a service is critically dependent on a
| single server or maintainer as a design failure. Software
| should allow users to be more self-sufficient, not less.
|
| Software allows users to be as self-sufficient or not,
| depending on their skills and resources. There is room
| for a whole spectrum of users, and obviously as
| developers we fall on that spectrum as well.
|
| Self suffiency, in any area, is expensive in time, and
| money. I can grow my own food by buying the land and
| devoting all day to farming. I'm self sufficient, but I
| don't have time for anything else.
|
| Equally I can choose to spend time running my own
| servers. I can buy hardware, learn many things, make
| mistakes, but be self sufficient.
|
| However all that time spent is time I'm not focusing on
| my business. If my cousin runs a school, they want a
| "system that just works". They aren't interested in being
| self-sufficient. They don't have the time, or money, to
| (safely) host their own software. They are too busy
| adding value to their business elsewhere.
|
| (most) OSS to some extent solves a problem that only very
| few people have. It caters to those who are time rich but
| cash poor. Most people though are time poor, and can
| easily find cash to make problems go away.
|
| Adobe wins over Gimp because it does more, faster, thus
| saving the user time. Its a lot easier to find money than
| time, so paying the subscription is trivial. If it saves
| an hour a month, you're ahead even at minimum wage
| levels.
|
| Of course there are those who value self-sufficiency, who
| seek out solutions that reduce, or remove, the supply
| chain. These folk exist in every part of society, and it
| is a perfectly good approach.
|
| But it is worth understanding that this is a tiny subset
| of people. Most buy their food in a shop. Most are just
| using their computer to perform tasks. They have no more
| desire to write their own code, or host their own server,
| than they do to grow their own food.
| johnfn wrote:
| > Yeah, pretty short-sighted of you to go out of your way
| to design those systems in a way that is dependent on a
| single company hosting it.
|
| I don't think we can have a productive conversation if
| you make statements like these.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > How many projects that you haven't touched in the last
| 5 years still run?
|
| The ones which were built like a tank in terms of
| adherence to standards, minimization of dependencies and
| of assumptions regarding the platform, non-flakey build
| system etc.
|
| > If your software stops adding features, it will quickly
| be out-competed by software which does have new features
|
| Not usually. You're probably thinking of things like web
| browsers.
|
| > because servers require upkeep
|
| If your software does not require continuously running
| global server(s) then that is not an issue.
|
| Otherwise I mostly agree.
| whateveracct wrote:
| People still use programs like grafx2 and klystrack. They
| don't need big updates - they are what they are and do what
| they do nicely.
| sverhagen wrote:
| GIMP is a good alternative to Photoshop for someone like me,
| who is not a professional designer, just someone who needs to
| touch up an occasional picture. So what GIMP has done is
| removing my "need" to run an illegal copy of Photoshop (a
| practice I really hated and stopped with a long time ago). If
| I'm a professional user of anything, I should be ready to pay
| for it. Else hard to claim I'm a professional.
|
| What the article should acknowledge is the difference between
| an alternative and the shift of which tool is... the gold
| standard.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > 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 to an extreme, companies could use a crowd-
| funding campaign to provide the initial capital, and make the
| code available under an open licence even while it is still being
| written.
|
| The only hurdle to implementing that model is finding a community
| of people who would value some piece of software that doesn't
| exist yet, and who don't mind waiting for it to be created,
| although the crowd-funding could be done on a per-feature basis.
| jacooper wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be that. Nextcloud is fully libre, yet
| its a company with income and profit.
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| Yes, but not from selling the software. Nextcloud makes money
| from hosting and support, exactly as the article lines out.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Unglue[1] tried to do (roughly) this for books, but seems to
| have stagnated in the recent years, unfortunately.
|
| [1] https://unglue.it/
| rvz wrote:
| > All software will be open source, and no one will make money
| with software.
|
| This is simply a very utopian claim and just isn't going to
| happen. One example is Microsoft Office which has been replaced
| by Google Docs / Office Online, etc and little to no-one installs
| LibreOffice directly.
|
| Unfortunately, closed-source software is here to stay and the
| only absolute here is: There isn't any.
| magpi3 wrote:
| > This is simply a very utopian claim and just isn't going to
| happen. One example is Microsoft Office which has been replaced
| by Google Docs / Office Online, etc and little to no-one
| installs LibreOffice directly.
|
| Well the world changed under LibreOffice's feet when the
| browser became a strong enough platform for office products.
| There is a lesson here: open source is slow, so don't just
| chase the present because it will become the past by the time
| you are viable. I can remember when some of the FSF's highest
| priorities were developing free software versions of RealPlayer
| and Flash.
|
| Someone else on this thread already mentioned that what open
| source software does best is infrastructure, and I would add
| libraries to that. It definitely moves too slowly for cutting
| edge, modern application development unless a corporation is
| backing it.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| This is only a utopian claim if you are a software developer
| who does not need to make money to live. Otherwise it's utterly
| dystopian and essentially reduces the developer to a provider
| of free labour. I sometimes think that open source is the
| greatest trick that late stage capitalism ever pulled.
| amelius wrote:
| > I sometimes think that open source is the greatest trick
| that late stage capitalism ever pulled.
|
| Don't let Stallman hear that.
| npteljes wrote:
| >Open source is coming for your business. It is just a matter of
| time before there exists a compelling open source alternative to
| your software.
|
| Are we really taking this seriously in the booming world of
| proprietary software / SAAS culture? Come on.
|
| "All software will be open source, and no one will make money
| with software."
|
| What a load of bullshit. First of all, humanity would be nicely
| off to have a set of open source resources that are at least
| usable to participate in society. And we've not reached this
| point, yet.
|
| Second, what about OTHER proprietary alternatives? It's not like
| closed source is a fun club where they all respect each other's
| hard work and only original ideas boom. Somehow after the success
| of Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and others become
| very popular. And no matter how many Syncthings and
| Open/Nextclouds there are, they still make a good amount of money
| - even Dropbox still exists.
|
| This article is just a hit piece against FOSS.
| hintymad wrote:
| There could be an open source alternative to our software, yet it
| will be much harder to have an _economically competitive_ open
| source alternative to systems or workflows. Amazon 's Open Search
| Service, for instance, is just a control plane on top of Open
| Search (and Elasticsearch some time ago), yet so many companies
| flock to the service because they simply do not want to be
| bothered with manning a search service.
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| > In the future - and maybe it'll take a couple more decades -
| all software will be open source, and no one will make money with
| software. And I think that's a good thing.
|
| Ignoring open source "alternatives" with UX so poor I'm still
| glad to pay for the proprietary thing. Ignoring all the web-based
| stuff for which a large part of the code is behind a closed
| source API.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > It is just a matter of time before there exists a compelling
| open source alternative to your software
|
| The word "just" doesn't fit that sentence. Most commercial
| companies offer products and services for which it's "just" a
| matter of time before they become obsolete, irrelevant or
| unavailable. This may be due to technological reasons (propeller
| passenger aircraft which gave way to jets, sailing ships which
| gave way to steamers etc.) or social reasons (e.g. rigid-
| structured wide dresses - or for that matter, last year's fashion
| lines).
|
| I believe in Open-Source - and Libre-licensed - software. But
| that argument is rather weak.
|
| Also - it seems to me like most software which runs "closed-
| source" hardware - be it cars, household electric appliances,
| etc. is likely to stay closed, since such hardware is developed
| and released routinely so there is always a reverse-engineering
| challenge before that can be opened up. And usually, there are
| not enough people with enough interest to reverse-engineer "all
| the things".
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| Having heard this kind of argument since the late 90s, I'm amused
| that it's three HN links up from GIMP finally getting some CMYK
| support after ~25 years.
| ouid wrote:
| The trend is downward because of how a proprietary technology
| released 3 years ago cannot have had its time to open source be 5
| years.
| JoshMcguigan wrote:
| I agree with you, but the article does address this point.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Incorrectly.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| Matlab OSS equivalent is octave
| jongjong wrote:
| It's an interesting article but I'm not sure that the conclusion
| is correct. The existence of a similar or superior open source
| solution does not guarantee that a proprietary solution will lose
| most of its users to that open source alternative; especially if
| there are network effects at play.
|
| Also, when it comes to B2B solutions, network effects have a
| massive effect on the procurement process. The people who decide
| what software a large company should buy/use are more likely to
| buy from their friends' companies (or they might get some kind of
| kickback payment or job offer down the line)... So there is no
| incentive for insiders to use the free solution no matter how
| good it is.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| Until Women will get wet when they hear that you are an open
| source developer this will never be the case.
|
| You are better off hitting the gym instead of developing software
| for free.
| amelius wrote:
| I suppose most FOSS developers have passed that level of
| Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
| woevdbz wrote:
| Bad metric, bad methodology, survivor bias... I'm still expecting
| a kick-ass open source video editor or digital audio workstation
| any day now...
| Ygg2 wrote:
| When is there going to be OSS alternative to Windows? No, Linux
| doesn't count. It's good for servers but terrible desktop
| experience.
| glasshug wrote:
| Funnily enough, Linux may be one of the few projects in the
| "alternatives" column that _is_ viable :)
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Yeah. I've been hearing about Linux Desktop for the last 20
| years. It's 31 year old.
|
| I think either desktops will disappear (replaced by
| commodified computers like Androids/Chromebooks); Or a large
| company will set some kind of standard what Linux OS is; Or
| some other OSS OS will not make same mistakes Linux did and
| guarantee a saner target for app development than current
| Linux.
|
| I want (3) to happen (e.g. Serenity OS blows up and just
| devours Linux marketshare). I suspect (1) will happen -
| Microsoft/Google/Apple just make their locked down garden and
| Desktop computers go the way of the Dodo.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Well, until you want to run Photoshop or Ableton.
| chungy wrote:
| ReactOS, and approximately in 1998.
| rvz wrote:
| Very good question. The answer doesn't exist today, unless
| somehow billions of dollars pours into ReactOS for it to be
| compatible with Windows 11, but another utopian and unrealistic
| chance of that happening.
|
| We are looking for a full desktop open source to Windows so
| GNU/Linux doesn't count as an alternative, and neither does
| Wine. But the closest to answering that is ReactOS despite it
| not being a realistic alternative for the end user today.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| I meant a modern GUI oriented OS that's stable (see glibc
| 2.36 breaking EAC and other apps*) and nice to develop for.
|
| Compatibility with Windows or POSIX would be amazing but not
| required.
|
| * Yeah, I get it. Changing from `DT_HASH` to `DT_GNU_HASH`
| had to happen at some point. Backwards compatibility is a
| real chore, and not what glibc maintainers bound themselves
| to.
| shakna wrote:
| Whilst it's not particular nice to develop for, Android
| sits on the Linux kernel. I haven't heard any convincing
| argument not to consider Android a "Linux for the desktop",
| in the sense of mass adoption and people using it as their
| everyday device.
| wilg wrote:
| It's the year of the Linux desktop!
| sidlls wrote:
| Only a scant handful of the open source alternatives in that
| table (Linux, git, gitlab, audacity, vlc media player) are
| compelling, if we use some measure of adoption as compelling.
| Most of the rest are all but unknown or so sparsely used as to be
| negligible compared to the software they supposedly displaced or
| will displace.
|
| My (probably controversial) opinion is that this is because many
| (most) of these alternatives are developed by people with an
| _ideology_ as their agenda rather than to meet market demands.
| The OSS alternatives in almost every case are inferior in terms
| of features and usability as a result of this.
| butterNaN wrote:
| It is impossible to be without ideology. Even if you think
| you're free from it, you just subscribe to the 'default'
| ideology of your environments.
|
| Meeting market demands _is_ an ideology.
| sidlls wrote:
| That's a fair point: but it doesn't change the underlying
| narrative. The ideology motivating development of (F)OSS
| alternatives frequently produces software that is not as good
| as that produced by a market-demand ideology.
| butterNaN wrote:
| I would agree on that.
|
| My initial diagnosis is that it's because of limited/nil
| feedback. Market driven projects at least have _some_ sort
| of user feedback (e.g. early market research) that drives
| the development. It is often flawed but it 's better than
| just a bunch of engineers assuming stuff.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, it is the hippie culture of the 70's community gardens and
| such applied to software, eventually everyone went to Wall
| Street and similar places during the 80's.
|
| Similarly, after the FOSS wave, we are now back at models
| similar to shareware and demoware, because guess what, money is
| important.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I don't think the problem is that the development is agenda
| driven. It's more that the "last 10%" of work takes 99% of the
| effort. These alternatives look very good on a checkbox list
| but when you actually try to use them they just don't hold up
| and the work to get them there is immense. It's why almost
| relevant software has an army of workers behind them and more
| than just developers.
|
| A few devs on there own are never going to be able to keep up.
| k__ wrote:
| Reminds me of an app I build.
|
| 4 screens for the main tasks
|
| 12 screens for onboarding
| sidlls wrote:
| I think our points are aligned. The agenda driven nature of
| the genesis of these alternatives is part of the reason few
| developers work on them. Which, as you note, is why the "last
| 10%" doesn't get done.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| I'd argue that LibreOffice, Inkscape, 7zip, Firefox, FileZilla,
| OBS, bitwarden are also well known, well used and compelling.
|
| Hell, OBS is arguably better than anything out there. There's
| also Blender.
|
| I think your bias is too strong. It's not so much controversial
| as misguided. People do things to meet their own needs and pain
| points and then products evolve. Having paid people behind
| products would make you think a product will be better but it's
| not necessarily the case. Also, different products might be
| better at different things (Firefox, despite some backsteps, is
| still more customizable than the closed source alternatives).
| kuon wrote:
| While I am a big proponent of open source, a few are not good
| enough yet. The most important one being CAD. No CAD is good
| enough for serious mechanical engineering except commercial ones.
| The creative software (GIMP, inkscape) can replace Adobe but they
| are much harder yo use with worse integration between them. In
| the other direction, some OSS software are just way better than
| the commercial solution (I'd put OBS in those).
| jacooper wrote:
| Its seems in general anything Creative, FOSS struggles at.
| wizzledonker wrote:
| My recent experience with OpenCASCADE is that since the new
| FUSE algorithm was introduced for Boolean operations with fuzzy
| values [0] the library itself is definitely up to par for
| professional use. (Although it's unfortunate that many API
| entry points do not advertise their newer versions, and many
| developers end up using slower, legacy algorithms). Recent
| development trajectory on OpenCASCADE has been quite
| impressive.
|
| What's missing is a compelling user application now, and this
| is tarnished by the kernels existing reputation. Case in point,
| shapr (an iOS CAD modelling app) switched away from OpenCASCADE
| in 2017, before development trajectory really took off [1]
|
| Also, when searching OpenCASCADE in Google, you get hacker news
| comments like this [2]
|
| [0]https://dev.opencascade.org/content/fuzzy-boolean-operations
| [1] https://discourse.shapr3d.com/t/shapr3d-3-0-is-here-and-
| it-s... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536518
| [deleted]
| owly wrote:
| Good examples. OBS is definitely superior. As much as I would
| like open source creative software, I recommend the closed
| source Affinity Photo and Designer as Adobe alternatives. Very
| inexpensive and extremely simple to use.
| alkonaut wrote:
| 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 be
| significantly replaced by the ones in the OSS column _or_ a
| future OSS alternative.
|
| > All software will be open source, and no one will make money
| with software.
|
| Most software is boring niche business software. Most developers
| work on software that most people will never hear about. And no
| one would ever create it unless it is to pay their bills.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| > 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.
| bjornsing wrote:
| 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" whose work I can
| download from GitHub for free and file my issues / complaints
| with there?
|
| I guess this benefits the mediocre software engineer (who can now
| accomplish things by cobbling together open source that they
| would never be able to accomplish from scratch), and perhaps it's
| also a plus for the top 0.001% who are good hustlers too and can
| make a career out of touring around conferences as some kind of
| nerd celebrities. But for the skilled and professional engineer
| (say top 5-25%) I'm starting to feel it's a trap.
|
| (Open source is great for basic infrastructure though, like
| operating systems, compilers, interpreters, frameworks like
| TensorFlow or PyTorch, etc. I'm definitely not against it in
| general.)
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Waiting for an open source GPU
| 00s_enthusiast wrote:
| The trend towards the open source replacement appearing faster
| and faster is intriguing.
|
| Yet, the fundamental reason for software simping still applies:
|
| Herd people don't go with what's free, they go with what's
| popular.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| >Sublime... Atom
|
| https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/
|
| What's the "Time Til Open Source Alternative Abandoned?"
| needle0 wrote:
| What exactly is "software" though? Is it just the code, or does
| it include the whole tech infrastructure that runs it, or even
| all the business agreements that makes the service possible and
| makes it all available to the end user? For the average user, the
| perception of software is increasingly shifting towards the third
| definition.
|
| I agree the first definition can be cloned fairly quickly, but
| the second is tougher, and the third requires cloning of
| practically the entire company operations. Imagine how hard it
| would be to, say, make an open source clone of something like
| Netflix, INCLUDING the vast majority of the video content
| provided -- all legally, of course!
| legulere wrote:
| If you look at the list something becomes obvious: it's mostly
| software used by other programmers. If the software isn't
| directly targeted at software developers like gimp is, there will
| be less success.
|
| If you look a B2B Software software developers never will use,
| often there exist no open source solutions.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Interestingly, this list mostly covers desktop applications and
| social media. There's a couple of outliers, like Linux, the Siri
| and Google translate alternatives, but I noticed many missing
| categories. Relational databases, accounting & tax preparation,
| CRM, document management, and so on.
| vikramkr wrote:
| It is unsurprising to me that any software that was launched
| within the last couple years that also has an open source
| alternative would have had that open source alternative developed
| in less than a couple years time...
|
| (I know the article mentions thr "blind spot" in the chart
| further down, but that's such a glaringly obvious issue that just
| acknowledging it as an issue doesn't make the conclusion any less
| absurd)
| benreesman wrote:
| I think this hinges a great deal on how strict the definition of
| OSS is.
|
| There's a (generally positive IMHO) trend towards more SOTA stuff
| being _source available_ over time, but if it's part of your
| business you're paying someone to maintain and support it (even
| if it's yourself). And a vibrant range of options from elite
| proprietary niche stuff to radically-licensed free software is a
| great thing!
|
| Compilers are a great case-in-point: for ages 'GCC' was knocking
| the stuffing out of much/most commercial stuff, at the moment the
| pendulum has swung almost completely over to LLVM which is like,
| way more tied into industry, and maybe it swings back at some
| point.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| Even if all software is open-source (which I doubt), that does
| not mean that nobody can earn money from it; there are still ways
| to earn money, too.
|
| Others:
|
| MS-DOS / PC-DOS -- FreeDOS
|
| ZZT -- ZZT (the source code was rewritten to produce the same
| executable file; the original source code was not made available)
|
| MESH:Hero Hearts -- Free Hero Mesh
|
| Windows NT -- ReactOS
|
| BTRON -- B-Free (incomplete and seems to be abandoned?)
|
| (And, the above are definitely not all)
| IncRnd wrote:
| In many cases I use opensource. In a few instances I want a
| company that supports their products, makes bug-fixes, and is
| responsive to the concerns and needs of my company. In yet other
| cases, I need to prove the utility and deterministic longevity of
| software without philosophical arguments. Yes, much software that
| is opensource is not as good as for-profit software.
| magpi3 wrote:
| I have thought this for a while. Open Source/Free software is
| like the Jason Voorhees in those old Friday the 13th movies
| (although with more positive effects). Sure you can outrun him
| for a while, but he is unstoppable and while you tire, he never
| will.
|
| The economic factors that can undermine a closed-source project,
| and that seemingly inevitably will undermine most closed-source
| projects one day, have little to no effect on an open source one.
| An open source project just needs developer mind share and users,
| and it can go on indefinitely. And it doesn't need a lot. Maybe
| just 5-10 developers and a 100 users or so and it will keep
| progressing. And with a global developer and userbase to draw
| from, that is not a hard number to achieve.
|
| Just look at Haiku OS.
|
| https://www.haiku-os.org/
|
| That project by all rights should be dead. But 20 years have
| passed and it is still very much alive. And it keeps getting
| better. And one day who knows.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Nice they have a hobby, but it is hardly the experience that
| using BeOS once was.
| contravariant wrote:
| That graph with the green 'blind spot' deserves some praise. A
| lot of people might have missed the (in hindsight) obvious
| censoring problem with the data and just ran with the conclusion
| that the duration is decreasing rapidly.
| kristopolous wrote:
| 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.
| vitiral wrote:
| > Two things become clear with this chart... Second, the trend is
| downward
|
| Um... No. The "trend" is due to the fact we don't know the
| future.
|
| Seriously, it takes about 7-10 years for a OS project to take
| off, so you won't be seeing the 10 year replacements for
| proprietary software from 5 years ago.
|
| The "trend" looks like more of a random distribution which
| narrows as it gets closer to the present.
| wongarsu wrote:
| There's a graph further down about this point. Both the minimum
| and the maximum appear to be dropping. Though especially with
| the minimum there might be recency bias at play here. It's not
| exactly a random sample of software we're looking at.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| I'm excitedly awaiting the open source alternative to Oodle!
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