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I don't think either of those subscription services are unicorns or making billionaires. If anything I'm happy to see indie developers able to maintain a decent

I don't think either of those subscription services are unicorns or making billionaires. If anything I'm happy to see indie developers able to maintain a decent income making useful (but often niche) tools that other people can use. Of all the SaaS services I pay for, it's one like these that I'm the least apprehensive spending money on. Video codecs are hard. PDFs are a labyrinth of a file format with traps everywhere. I bet whatever open source equivalent you'd find of these services either require some serious additional tooling to get what you want or are too outdated to be useful anymore because the maintainer moved on from the project.

akiselev 6y ago
Video codecs are hard, but the reason video utils become services is because the best (by a mile) video codec libraries are (L)GPLed. I suspect the same is true for the best PDF libraries that would be integrated into desktop applications (meaning compiled like SumatraPDF's library, since there are plenty of JS/Python permissive licensed libraries). All the developers I know immediately jump down a level to ffmpeg command line utils or up a level to proper video editing software (often pirated, no less), so there's no incentive to develop a high quality simple video editor.
- mcoliver 6y ago
  kdenlive - https://kdenlive.org https://kdenlive.org shotcut - http://www.shotcutapp.com http://www.shotcutapp.com olive - https://github.com/olive-editor/olive https://github.com/olive-editor/olive
  - makapuf 6y ago
    Blender - https://www.blender.org/features/video-editing/ https://www.blender.org/features/video-editing/
- kybernetikos 6y ago
  Yeah, I wonder if things like ffmpeg would have been created in the current culture, or if it would have been a VC funded webservice paid for with a monthly subscription, and when the company eventually failed, all the code would have vanished with it, rather than being progressively improved by a large number of people through the years and having a phenomenal positive impact on the world.

akiselev 6y ago

Video codecs are hard, but the reason video utils become services is because the best (by a mile) video codec libraries are (L)GPLed. I suspect the same is true for the best PDF libraries that would be integrated into desktop applications (meaning compiled like SumatraPDF's library, since there are plenty of JS/Python permissive licensed libraries). All the developers I know immediately jump down a level to ffmpeg command line utils or up a level to proper video editing software (often pirated, no less), so there's no incentive to develop a high quality simple video editor.

mcoliver 6y ago
kdenlive - https://kdenlive.org https://kdenlive.org shotcut - http://www.shotcutapp.com http://www.shotcutapp.com olive - https://github.com/olive-editor/olive https://github.com/olive-editor/olive
- makapuf 6y ago
  Blender - https://www.blender.org/features/video-editing/ https://www.blender.org/features/video-editing/
kybernetikos 6y ago
Yeah, I wonder if things like ffmpeg would have been created in the current culture, or if it would have been a VC funded webservice paid for with a monthly subscription, and when the company eventually failed, all the code would have vanished with it, rather than being progressively improved by a large number of people through the years and having a phenomenal positive impact on the world.