Time Till Open Source Alternative
staltz.com
staltz.com
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)
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.
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.
Any notion of "setting priorities" would go right out the window. It would have to entirely be about giving gifts, which is what open source is based on, anyway.
"I talked to 5 of our users about this problem. Here's what they said in summary, with some pull quotes. Here's how 3 other libraries solve this problem. I added 2 more ideas, made a table comparing all of them. Here's the 1 I think is the best, if anyone wants to make it."
Then it gets picked up or not (probably not lol). But no "influencing" past that. The influencing is just doing useful research, idea generation, and sharing it.
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.
In the case of Windows, the machine can be eventually upgraded, one part at a time, into something more powerful.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
GIMP is just awful. It's worse than any of the commercial Mac paint programs including Pixelmator, acorn, etc.
I neither support nor deny this belief but it's an increasingly common impression.
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
I guess I'm lucky that I haven't pissed off the GCP algo yet.
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.
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.
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.
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
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/google-cs... [1]https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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).
Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Take whatever nice features you can “for free” as tech debt, and if that api inevitably disappears… push it down the stack and own a bit more of it.
If you have to build everything from first principles it’ll take way longer to get going.
Smart but not obvious.
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.
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.
> Surely they see it.
(Question not directed at you specifically.)
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.)
One of the rare areas where barrier to innovation isn't market access but actually product quality. That being said I wouldn't pay a lot for this as a standalone service, though I would definitely pay for a standalone email client at this point.
Practically speaking, most big (tech) companies probably have split teams for UI/Product and Ads. So there’s most likely a team of product managers and engineers at G who’s entire job is to make Gmail better - regardless of the ad team in the next building over. So those people literally don’t care about making G money per se, as long as they’re not introducing bugs into the ad showing logic or making it worse (see first point).
I feel pretty bad for the ads team honestly. Like, their job is to basically just ruin products. Literally no one likes anything they do, ever. Their justification for everything is always just "You have to let us do this because $$$" and no one respects that, even though everyone knows that it's how the world works.
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.
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.
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".
And now in 2022 any gmailinbox is fn full of spam...
So yeah - THEY _supported_ the product by paying millions for it...
Then they did "the other thing"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Blender would be another example. How are they run?
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Money was never the issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
What is this mutually shared meme-delusion that Gimp is anywhere close to 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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
Thats not far off at all actually.
Infrastructure you can trust. Most close sourced tech will lock you in and you're at their mercy - no thanks.
This is why it's mostly in infrastructure. But it works in product applications - like Epic contributing to Blender because it enables their platform.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Lightwave 3D was already not exactly what I call high end software competing with software that was really a lot more advanced but it carved out a niche. When Blender was announced it looked pretty darn close to Lightwave and after playing with it just didn't seem intuitive enough to keep with trying to convert what little I knew already to this. But now decades later, Softimage users are fleeing to Blender. I'm pretty certain now that I will not be buying any more Lightwave upgrades. Besides, Modo is better at being Lightwave than Lightwave is. Blender is the most successful free software art and film tool since we knew what free software is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The takeover of free software may be slow, but it is one-directional.
- 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.
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.
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."
I don't think we can have a productive conversation if you make statements like these.
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.
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.
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.
Otoh nothing prohibits another OSS software appearing and stealing an OSS incumbent's thunder. See Krita and Gimp.
I mean I heard people use Blender as a Gimp replacement. Because it can edit huge number of files in a batch.
Blender always had a professional userbase around it, unlike the Photoshop wannabe competition.
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.
I think Cisco still uses proprietary software too.
MySQL and Postgres are kind of nice, but not really the same league at tooling level.
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.
I'd say that the cutting point is when no new project considers Oracle as a viable tool. This time has largely come already.
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.
> 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.
What the article should acknowledge is the difference between an alternative and the shift of which tool is... the gold standard.
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.
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.)
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.
As for grep, there are plenty of newer attempts, like ripgrep, ack, and ag, too.
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.
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.
Of course. I meant it's suitable for many, many purposes, which explains why it has millions of users.
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.
More energy seems to be put into emulation of proprietary games than creation of new open source games.
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.
Can't imagine anyone doing this open source.
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.
A few devs on there own are never going to be able to keep up.
4 screens for the main tasks
12 screens for onboarding
Similarly, after the FOSS wave, we are now back at models similar to shareware and demoware, because guess what, money is important.
Meeting market demands _is_ an ideology.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
Netscape Navigator -> Mosaic: -692 days
Slack -> IRC: -9102 days
Yeah, there is a future that is not represented, so there is no reason to assume any downward trend. Plus he only sampled things for which there were open source alternatives (which are also questionable: e.g., AutoCAD - a full featured CAD tool versus Open Cascade, a C++ lib with no UI? Really?!).
The proper way to do such an analysis if different on almost every choice the author made:
1. Randomly, uniformly sample products/service over all time (somewhat difficult). Or better yet, make a cutoff date far enough the past to hide the fake triangle due to items being release last year.
2. Find OS alternative, it if exists, and most importantly, decide on some level of how much is is actually an alternative. Almost nothing on this list is an actual alternative, any more than a text editor is a MS Word replacement.
3. Analyze more carefully.
Post selecting products that fit a desired outcome, ignoring lots and lots of other products, ignoring the time bias, and calling things replacements that are not, then drawing these conclusions, is really bad analysis.
>it still takes years until it can outright displace the proprietary champion
How many items on even this biased selection list displaced the proprietary champion by killing their market? None? A few proprietary products died well on their own. And in this time frame, how many open source projects died?
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.
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.
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.
Don't let Stallman hear that.
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.
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.
Still there is no open-source replacement that can match it as a desktop operating system aimed towards end users.
The same is true of MacOS there is no open-source replacement that can match it as a desktop operating system aimed towards end users.
MacOS in addition is solely developed for end users unlike Windows which is also focused on Windows Server and Linux where the vast majority of developmet is based on server projects,embeded systems, etc not desktop
Windows allegedly has 1,5 billion -active- users Mac has 100 million. Desktop Linux allegedly has 33 million. (leaving out Android phone users, since that does not match "desktop users"
This will probably be an unpopular view at Hacker News,
and there are plenty of stories of getting your friend, mom, dad, aunt, grandparents, etc etc switched over to Linux and how great it was. But then Bluetooth, sleep, sometimes graphic cards, networking/wifi has to be resolved unless you they happen to have a laptop that matches 100% to a Linux distro.
Yes there are good efforts on creating an alternative version of Windows that is compatble but its not production ready.
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.
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)
(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)
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.)
There are also medical clinics that offer medical services across the United States to those that qualify. Many medical studies and patents are publicly accessible on the web. There are organizations that offer compensation and health-care for those willing to volunteer for medical studies, questionnaires or clinal trials.
Additional lawyers and doctors offer “free” work that grow their business. Why do you think some lawyers offer free consolations. Why do some dental offices offer free cleanings or free consultations and exams when patients are looking for braces?
When folks equate “free” and “opensource” and mention “doctors” or “lawyers”, they imagine the lawyer working on their probate and wills for free or representing them on traffic accidents for “free” and in reality, that’s never going to happen.
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".
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.
If you look a B2B Software software developers never will use, often there exist no open source solutions.
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!
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.
Firefox isnt an alternative to netscape, its literally a fork.
Why is 7zip the alternative to winzip and not gzip?
Etc
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.
"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.
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.
You are better off hitting the gym instead of developing software for free.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I wrote about this trend at some point last year btw: https://rajko-rad.medium.com/the-rise-of-open-source-challen...
https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/
What's the "Time Til Open Source Alternative Abandoned?"
Working for free is the new normal ?
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.
Cost isn’t irrelevant. Either you burn software on floppy, cd or make it available over internet and download, all those have a cost. Also between cost or RD and development, documentation writing, there cost after sales with customer support and product patching.
Open source is like blogging. You bear the cost (hidden or not) to publish you work for which you are very rarely paid (directly or indirectly). Once published, you lost control of potential benefit over your work,
I clearly remember the gpg développer calling for financial help after more Than 20years developing almost alone this crucial piece of software with almost 20k euros yearly income from standard job. I was working in paiement industry where this piece of software is the key element of the business protecting file transfert containing millions of euros. The company benefit was around 6billions euros a year and all this would not have been possible without a pci-dad certification based on gpg. Is it normal ? When I inform them that the author of their key piece of code so important to their business was struggling with just basic living, they didn’t move a finger. While myself as a self employed was. One of the first to send several hundred euros to this poor guy. Once the new hit major info website, then Google or Facebook transférés some money, in an public relation initiative.
So this case is typical of why OSS is a financial failure.
When I patched ansible, I worked, I spent time and done intellectual work for this project, adding value , easing and solving problem users faced and extended the possibility of the software. When it was bought by redhat, I didn’t get a penny for my work. My family didn’t benefited from my work, as a father I failed to feed them from my work. So who can rejoice of such situation where work isn’t rewarded ? (Beside getting a little Github medal for having a PR accepted)
Very well articulated.
Yet, the fundamental reason for software simping still applies:
Herd people don't go with what's free, they go with what's popular.
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.