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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

Examples I haven't seen mentioned yet:

Firefox. Atom/VSCode (Sublime Text clones). Android (iOS clone).

Various databases (postgres, mongodb, etc).

Reddit (Digg alternative, since closed source) though I'm not sure releasing their source code had anything to do with their success.

HashiCorp in general sort of counts though it's harder to say "it was competing against X".

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I wouldn’t call Atom/VSCode “clones” of Sublime Text. They were clearly inspired, but are missing the minimalist interface and high performance that for me are key features of Sublime Text.

In this sense, I consider Zed to be more of in the Sublime Text genre than VSCode or Atom was.

Firefox is open sourced Netscape Navigator 5.0.

No, it's not. We tossed that code 6 months after the open sourcing and started fresh to build the Communicator clone which we then tossed aside for the entirely new Firefox. Firefox is not Navigator 5. That's plain inaccurate.

In the context of this question, I think it's perfectly accurate. Firefox did not start as a grassroots developed open-source project, like Linux did.

Android is not a iOS clone, and open source-ish (Google still decides the roadmap)

Android existed (internally) before iOS, but to quote a google engineer working on it at the time, iOS released and they went "We’re going to have to start over."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...

> and open source-ish (Google still decides the roadmap)

Open source doesn't mean developed by committee, it means the source is released openly and under a permissive license. That is unquestionably done with android, to the point where competitors have taken that source and made competing phones without Google's involvement.

Atom development has ceased, does that count as successful?

All will cease at some point but we shouldn't wait too long just to be pragmatic judging success.

Yes. You don't have to continue to exist forever to be successful, to suggest otherwise would be to amongst other things suggest that no human ever succeeds.

Atom development didn't cease because it failed as a product. It ceased because the company building it was acquired by a company that had already built a (open source) clone to compete with it.

Atom is actually alive and well as a community project under the new name “Pulsar”.

https://pulsar-edit.dev/

Care to elaborate in what ways Firefox counts as successful? Maybe it had a brief period of success (maybe) but that was long ago.

There are many ways to measure success, perhaps the easiest (though not necessarily the best) is money. Mozilla currently has net assets of >$1billion almost entirely earned off of it's back. It was without a doubt been a wildly successful product for the non-profit and to suggest otherwise is ludicrous. Likewise it continues to earn >$0.5billion/year revenue for that non-profit, to suggest that it doesn't continue to be a wildly successful product is ludicrous.

Could it have done even better for itself? Sure. Being the best possible version of yourself isn't necessary to have been successful though.

Before the rise of Chrome, it hovered at 20-30% market share for many years. After the preceding period of IE dominance, I’d call that successful.

Do you live in a world where success means "#1" and failure means "not #1"?

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