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Comment by 6ren | Hacker News Reader

I think open-source eventually replaces commercial products, in the same way that proprietary products become commoditized. The response for commercial products is also the same: continual differentiation, adding new features, benefits, support, documentation etc. Exceptions are also the same: natural monopolies (e.g. strong network effects).

Open-source is great at hill-climbing, where there are clear directions for improvement and especially for features that are obviously needed by users (provided the structure of the project is sufficiently modular to facilitate it), by tapping the collective intelligence of users.

It's not great at "hill-hopping": originating radically different products.

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Counter-examples abound. Can you name even one open source app that has displaced a mature, user-facing desktop app with a non-trivial UI, other than a web browser?

Open source only seems to win in domains in which it makes sense for companies to share work in order to compete at a higher tier of functionality.

You skipped the bit about differentiation: if, for example, photoshop didn't keep improving, do you think the gimp would never catch up? I think you could find lots of examples where today's open source version is better than an x-years-old proprietary product.

The only way it realistically can realistically happen if is the commercial product is not being improved (i.e. differentiated) any more. Your example is one of these - standardization is related to commodification.

I suspect also that user-facing apps are easier to keep improving, because the user is right there, and always has more needs that could be served (e.g. text editors will evolve til they can read mail; those that can't will be replaced by those that can). Non-user facing apps tend to be defined by their environment, rather than by users - although, any component that creates a benefit that the user wants more of will keep being improved (from Clayton Christensen). e.g. databases, CPUs.

VLC

It has by no means "displaced" its proprietary equivalent, but Inkscape is one of the most user-friendly open source apps I've ever used. I find it far more intuitive than Illustrator. An incredible amount of power and complexity is presented in a way that makes it quite intuitive and a joy to use. It's also easily extensible if you're a programmer.

Does OS X apps like iTerm and CyberDuck count?

But I agree with you and think that in the long run, open source is a big winner in infrastructure software, and generally just that.

You probably don't remember this, but Emacs did that in the 1980s. And then of course there's Android, but I guess you might not consider it a "desktop app". And then there's Wikipedia, which has completely displaced Encarta.

I don't think it makes sense to make generalizations about where "open source seems to win". Things are changing too fast; the circumstances that made it possible for Mozilla to beat IE in the mid-2000s no longer exist, for example.

putty

R's integration with free data sets is crazy. For quick analysis it is great. For development Numpy/SciPy/Matplotlib/PyCUDA is more suitable.

I do not think this applies to office suites? OpenOffice/abiword v. Ms Office/Pages or whatever it is? I

I don't think it's obvious that open source displaces commercial for scientific computing. For every example like R which has in many places displaced S-Plus, there are counterexamples like matlab, for which the open source clone Octave is a bad joke, at least the last time I tried using it: missing functions, slowness, extreme difficulty installing; or Mathematica, or eviews, or gauss, or Maple.

One other potential factor: a lot of this software is driven by academic use, either because academics used it or that's where people were first exposed, and academics often receive large discounts.

When did you last try Octave? Professor Andrew Ng recommended using Octave (probably because it's free) for the online Stanford machine learning class (http://ml-class.org/).

Probably not for a while. At this point octave has a TON of Matlab compatibility:

The grammar is pretty spot-on although there is usually some release latency when Mathworks changes it (obviously since their plans are not made know. Ahead of time).

Octave even has Matlab source level compatibility for mex files although they are slower than octaves own c interface.

If you start drifting away from Matlab core needs into the specialized add ins Mathworks provides (simulink, financial packages, etc) then Octave can't help. If you need those then I find that Matlab is rarely the tool for the job either (you just don't know it yet ;))

Cant even compare R, a statistical engine to Matrix Laboratory, a numerical matrix manipulation engine. they are different software packages designed for different purposes. eg. plugging R into a high grade NMR magnet and processing signals is probably not a good idea.

R is sick though and I am alwalys pleasently surprised at what clever people are doing with it. Octave on the other hand shouldn't be used until someone writes a proper interface and decent graphing. MATLAB is a million light years ahead of Octave in that regard

> extreme difficulty installing

Today's Octave installs do not need more than click-click-ok-done or apt-get install octave.

> for which the open source clone Octave is a bad joke

I think you're not giving Octave enough credit, considering that they have only a few part-time developers, and that nobody does sponsor them, they have accomplished a respectable amount of functionality over the last 20 years, it is extermely unfair calling them a "bad joke".

Of course with those limited resources they are not able to match the output of Mathworks, but what they can do as of yet is usually more than universities teach, and _still_ many departments are kind of married to Matlab, only mention Matlab to students, give only matlab examples, matlab labs, matlab exercises, etc. Also very respectable people like Gilbert Strang, who gave the MIT basic Linear Algebra and Computational Science and Engineering classes, seem to have enough vested interests in Mathworks to not even mention Octave to students briefly as something they can download and work at home. Octave is extremely powerful and capable for what you pay for it, and deserves at least a mention.

It is probably not different at other universities and other departments. Several professors I had to deal with were similar, either not even aware that open source packages like Octave, Scilab, Maxima, Scipy exist at all, or extremely faithfully married to companies behind proprietary packages like Matlab/Maple/Mathematica.

This is not a new issue. Institutionalised education is most of the time producing "knowledge workers", as MS put it a while back. But without the knowledge, of course.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1283...

What's replacing Matlab is not octave, but Python/Numpy.

I still wish there are going to be some syntax improvements to Python then. Matlab's way of working with matrices is simply excellent. Formulas on paper map almost one to one to the code. Apart from that I'd take Python over Matlab any day but am forced to work with it for some of my classes.

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