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It's harder to names ones that do, really. It's easy to find some "alternative" to most famous software packets, but despite people repeatedly naming all the sa

by krick 7y ago

It's harder to names ones that do, really. It's easy to find some "alternative" to most famous software packets, but despite people repeatedly naming all the same programs (known to pretty much anyone interested anyways), none of them can replace, say, photoshop. So, out of my head (and, yeah, all of them have "alternatives" no serious user would ever switch to): Ableton Live Adobe Photoshop Adobe Premiere AutoCAD Microsoft Office (Excel in particular) Google Calendar (self-hosted) VisualStudio of Jetbrains IDEs

monoideism 7y ago
> Adobe Photoshop They’re not open source, but quite a few graphic designers are switching from Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator to Affinity products like Photo and Designer. So Adobe is open to competitors, but they have to be very well executed (Affinity products are well-executed). Also, it’s my opinion that (open-source) Inkscape is slowly closing in on Adobe Illustrator (and Affinity Designer). Not there yet, by any measure, but on its way.
hiram112 7y ago
> Jetbrains IDEs The Community Edition of IntelliJ, at least, from which all the others derive (I believe) is open source. https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community
- krick 7y ago
  But you'll still spend money on PhpStorm (or whatever) and for a good reason. Besides, community edition very much does have open source alternatives: I cannot think of a reason it couldn't be replaces by, say, Eclipse. So it doesn't really mean anything.
trynewideas 7y ago
Re: Photoshop in particular, the better question might be "What alternatives are there to Photoshop _for a specific task or workflow_?" Photoshop does 3D modeling, animation, photo retouching, RAW processing, prepress, vector drawing, typography, and automation _before_ adding functionality that exists only in PS-compatible plugins. The component tasks all have alternatives, but nothing does all of those things in a unified interface, and _that's_ the feature where there's no real OSS alternative. (Although I'm tempted to say "Blender does" just to see what would happen.)
- krick 7y ago
  It's useless verbalism. Like in that koan, where a bunch of monks were asked to describe a jug, you can use all the words in attempt to describe what Photoshop does, but the point is, if you use Photoshop for the tasks most of professional users use it — which is retouching/design, because despite many people indeed use it for drawing, if you would talk about drawing you'd compare things to SAI/Kita instead — you most likely can not replace Photoshop by anything else without losing productivity. Why you cannot exactly do that would be a little different for every user, and that's pretty much the point — there is a thousand different things it can do, and most of them are crucial to some people, but useless to others. And something like Gimp having all of them but one crucial thing just doesn't cut it — you simply won't switch, despite it costing you significant amount of money. Because either you can work, or you cannot. And verbally specifying why is almost as much of work for Photoshop developers, as actually implementing it in code is.

by krick 7y ago

monoideism 7y ago

> Adobe Photoshop They’re not open source, but quite a few graphic designers are switching from Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator to Affinity products like Photo and Designer. So Adobe is open to competitors, but they have to be very well executed (Affinity products are well-executed). Also, it’s my opinion that (open-source) Inkscape is slowly closing in on Adobe Illustrator (and Affinity Designer). Not there yet, by any measure, but on its way.

hiram112 7y ago

> Jetbrains IDEs The Community Edition of IntelliJ, at least, from which all the others derive (I believe) is open source. https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

krick 7y ago
But you'll still spend money on PhpStorm (or whatever) and for a good reason. Besides, community edition very much does have open source alternatives: I cannot think of a reason it couldn't be replaces by, say, Eclipse. So it doesn't really mean anything.

trynewideas 7y ago

Re: Photoshop in particular, the better question might be "What alternatives are there to Photoshop _for a specific task or workflow_?" Photoshop does 3D modeling, animation, photo retouching, RAW processing, prepress, vector drawing, typography, and automation _before_ adding functionality that exists only in PS-compatible plugins. The component tasks all have alternatives, but nothing does all of those things in a unified interface, and _that's_ the feature where there's no real OSS alternative. (Although I'm tempted to say "Blender does" just to see what would happen.)

krick 7y ago
It's useless verbalism. Like in that koan, where a bunch of monks were asked to describe a jug, you can use all the words in attempt to describe what Photoshop does, but the point is, if you use Photoshop for the tasks most of professional users use it — which is retouching/design, because despite many people indeed use it for drawing, if you would talk about drawing you'd compare things to SAI/Kita instead — you most likely can not replace Photoshop by anything else without losing productivity. Why you cannot exactly do that would be a little different for every user, and that's pretty much the point — there is a thousand different things it can do, and most of them are crucial to some people, but useless to others. And something like Gimp having all of them but one crucial thing just doesn't cut it — you simply won't switch, despite it costing you significant amount of money. Because either you can work, or you cannot. And verbally specifying why is almost as much of work for Photoshop developers, as actually implementing it in code is.