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Comment by bearmode | Hacker News Reader

Has there ever been an example of an industry standard tool losing out to FOSS alternatives? Ever? There are reasons for that.

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I don't have hard numbers to prove, but I bet that Blender is currently wiping the floor with Autodesk Maya and 3dsmax in wide areas of the gamedev world, at least for new studios that have the luxury to start their asset production workflows from scratch (the others can't do much else than begrudgingly accept that Autodesk tightens the screws more and more until they can also break out of their self-induced vendor lock-in).

Which is a shame because Maya is actually a very decent product, or at least was until Autodesk bought it. I only actively followed Maya development until around 2018 when I maintained a plugin for it, and back then it was already pretty clear that Autodesk favours milking their existing customer base over investing into their product development.

Now QGIS is wiping the floor with Esri ArcGIS, in the geoprocessing niche. About 10-15 years ago Esri was nearly monopolistic in this space.

I just installed this and it is much better than Grass for my needs.

20 years ago if you were serious about a system with an rdbms is was sybase or oracle. Now almost everything is postgres.

The writing is on the wall for Altium, partially because they are shooting themselves in the foot with their pricing and feature releases (people and companies are tired of paying $3k/year for new via stitching tools when memory leak crashes still occur daily) and partially because Kicad has improved to the point where it is a viable alternative for small and medium projects.

Postgresql and other OSS DBMS taking over Oracle?

Even inside of AWS there are people who believe FOSS will always eventually surpass proprietary software.

no one runs a US Bank or insurance company using postgresql, I would guess.

Many. Perforce to Git. Many proprietary mobile operating systems to Android (partly FOSS but still).

Mobile OSes were always more of a cost center than a product in its own right.

In these cases OSS tends to be way more competitive.

There are some industry standard tools that are FOSS, for various values of "standard" - Blender might be the most well known.

Unix was a commercial standard that's lost out to Linux

Firefox, Chromium vs Internet Explorer, Opera, old Edge, even Netscape.

There hasn’t really been a market for paid browsers since the mid 90s.

If you’re giving put your software for free reusing OSS components makes a lot more sense KHTML -> webkit -> blink

linux, git, ffmpeg, arguably postgres and sqlite, blender may get there someday.

old school statistical/scientific software offerings like SPSS, Stata, Matlab have been mostly buried by R and Python.

and when was the last time you used a proprietary compiler other than MSVC?

> and when was the last time you used a proprietary compiler other than MSVC?

Yesterday, because embedded firmware development is pain writ large

True, on embedded you are stuck with gcc, clang or sdcc. All FOSS

IE lost to Chrome/Chromium and Firefox. Windows Media Player lost to VLC and MPC-HC. BandiCam and FRAPS lost to OBS. The GIF format lost to PNG (for non-animated images).

It's rare, but not impossible.

Put another way, I'm not sure what you would be paying for instead of using Audacity (for a full blown DAW, I'd still go with Reaper). I haven't used MuseScore in a long time (it was good enough for me back then), but it had also been improving a lot lately. And I don't know of anyone who still uses WinZip (though I still see WinRar on less savvy users).

Uh, linux in the data center?

Blender?

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