15 ms·

Time Till Open Source Alternative

500 points by feross 4y ago

ofrzeta 4y ago
Open Cascade is not an (open source) alternative to AutoCAD. Also there is none. (people talk about OpenSCAD and FreeCAD but neither of them are comparable to AutoCAD).
- fsloth 4y ago
  Yes, this comparison is extremely weird. The author did not really do his homework. It's like saying libpng is a replacement for Photoshop. 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.
- aothms 4y ago
  True. Came here to say that. QCAD is somewhat of an alternative to AutoCAD. OpenCASCADE is a foss alternative to e.g ACIS or Parasolid. 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?)
iyedgivehead 4y ago
> Dogehouse.tv as an alternative Does he realize it is just a failed project by Ben Awad. The site didn't even stay up for a year.
Ygg2 4y ago
When is there going to be OSS alternative to Windows? No, Linux doesn't count. It's good for servers but terrible desktop experience.
- glasshug 4y ago
  Funnily enough, Linux may be one of the few projects in the "alternatives" column that _is_ viable :)
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    Well, until you want to run Photoshop or Ableton.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    Yeah. I've been hearing about Linux Desktop for the last 20 years. It's 31 year old. 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.
- rvz 4y ago
  Very good question. The answer doesn't exist today, unless somehow billions of dollars pours into ReactOS for it to be compatible with Windows 11, but another utopian and unrealistic chance of that happening. 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.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    I meant a modern GUI oriented OS that's stable (see glibc 2.36 breaking EAC and other apps*) and nice to develop for. 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.
Gigachad 4y ago
>All software will be open source, and no one will make money with software. 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.
- TAForObvReasons 4y ago
  This is very simple to understand: in the long run, price tends to marginal cost of production. Open source represents the logical endpoint: since marginal cost of software is ~0, the endpoint is something with price ~0. SaaS is a response, but open source is already chipping away at the low end. 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.
  - jahewson 4y ago
    > in the long run, price tends to marginal cost of production 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.
dane-pgp 4y ago
> all software will be open source, and no one will make money with software. 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.
- jacooper 4y ago
  It doesn't even have to be that. Nextcloud is fully libre, yet its a company with income and profit.
  - cyborgx7 4y ago
    Yes, but not from selling the software. Nextcloud makes money from hosting and support, exactly as the article lines out.
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  Unglue[1] tried to do (roughly) this for books, but seems to have stagnated in the recent years, unfortunately. [1] https://unglue.it/ https://unglue.it/
sidlls 4y ago
Only a scant handful of the open source alternatives in that table (Linux, git, gitlab, audacity, vlc media player) are compelling, if we use some measure of adoption as compelling. Most of the rest are all but unknown or so sparsely used as to be negligible compared to the software they supposedly displaced or will displace. 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.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I don't think the problem is that the development is agenda driven. It's more that the "last 10%" of work takes 99% of the effort. These alternatives look very good on a checkbox list but when you actually try to use them they just don't hold up and the work to get them there is immense. It's why almost relevant software has an army of workers behind them and more than just developers. A few devs on there own are never going to be able to keep up.
  - sidlls 4y ago
    I think our points are aligned. The agenda driven nature of the genesis of these alternatives is part of the reason few developers work on them. Which, as you note, is why the “last 10%” doesn’t get done.
  - k__ 4y ago
    Reminds me of an app I build. 4 screens for the main tasks 12 screens for onboarding
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Yes, it is the hippie culture of the 70's community gardens and such applied to software, eventually everyone went to Wall Street and similar places during the 80's. Similarly, after the FOSS wave, we are now back at models similar to shareware and demoware, because guess what, money is important.
- 4y ago
kuon 4y ago
While I am a big proponent of open source, a few are not good enough yet. The most important one being CAD. No CAD is good enough for serious mechanical engineering except commercial ones. The creative software (GIMP, inkscape) can replace Adobe but they are much harder yo use with worse integration between them. In the other direction, some OSS software are just way better than the commercial solution (I'd put OBS in those).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wizzledonker 4y ago
  My recent experience with OpenCASCADE is that since the new FUSE algorithm was introduced for Boolean operations with fuzzy values [0] the library itself is definitely up to par for professional use. (Although it’s unfortunate that many API entry points do not advertise their newer versions, and many developers end up using slower, legacy algorithms). Recent development trajectory on OpenCASCADE has been quite impressive. 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 https://dev.opencascade.org/content/fuzzy-boolean-operations [1] https://discourse.shapr3d.com/t/shapr3d-3-0-is-here-and-it-s-changing-the-cad-landscape/1826 https://discourse.shapr3d.com/t/shapr3d-3-0-is-here-and-it-s... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536518
- jacooper 4y ago
  Its seems in general anything Creative, FOSS struggles at.
- owly 4y ago
  Good examples. OBS is definitely superior. As much as I would like open source creative software, I recommend the closed source Affinity Photo and Designer as Adobe alternatives. Very inexpensive and extremely simple to use.
vikramkr 4y ago
It is unsurprising to me that any software that was launched within the last couple years that also has an open source alternative would have had that open source alternative developed in less than a couple years time... (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)
contravariant 4y ago
That graph with the green 'blind spot' deserves some praise. A lot of people might have missed the (in hindsight) obvious censoring problem with the data and just ran with the conclusion that the duration is decreasing rapidly.
albertop 4y ago
I have yet to see open source alternative with UX that is better than original.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  bash(1) has a better UX than the original sh(1).
- jefftk 4y ago
  Firefox > IE (introduced tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking)
- landofredwater 4y ago
  I'd argue in favor of Blender. While complex, it uses very strong features and gives you lots of freedom to do as you wish.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Blender is not a clone of anything, it started as commercial product.
fallat 4y ago
Nice to see some data 2 years later to back this up https://ecc-comp.blogspot.com/2020/08/80-of-software-is-useless-other-20-is.html https://ecc-comp.blogspot.com/2020/08/80-of-software-is-usel...
- IncRnd 4y ago
  The first example in that doc is Sublime Text. "Unfortunately the only thing going for Sublime was that it was first-to-market with a few novel ideas, most notably multiple cursor editing." That was clearly written by someone who hadn't used Sublime. 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.
rvz 4y ago
> All software will be open source, and no one will make money with software. 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.
- magpi3 4y ago
  > 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. 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.
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  This is only a utopian claim if you are a software developer who does not need to make money to live. Otherwise it's utterly dystopian and essentially reduces the developer to a provider of free labour. I sometimes think that open source is the greatest trick that late stage capitalism ever pulled.
  - amelius 4y ago
    > I sometimes think that open source is the greatest trick that late stage capitalism ever pulled. Don't let Stallman hear that.
needle0 4y ago
What exactly is "software" though? Is it just the code, or does it include the whole tech infrastructure that runs it, or even all the business agreements that makes the service possible and makes it all available to the end user? For the average user, the perception of software is increasingly shifting towards the third definition. 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!
cratermoon 4y ago
Interestingly, this list mostly covers desktop applications and social media. There's a couple of outliers, like Linux, the Siri and Google translate alternatives, but I noticed many missing categories. Relational databases, accounting & tax preparation, CRM, document management, and so on.
IncRnd 4y ago
In many cases I use opensource. In a few instances I want a company that supports their products, makes bug-fixes, and is responsive to the concerns and needs of my company. In yet other cases, I need to prove the utility and deterministic longevity of software without philosophical arguments. Yes, much software that is opensource is not as good as for-profit software.
magpi3 4y ago
I have thought this for a while. Open Source/Free software is like the Jason Voorhees in those old Friday the 13th movies (although with more positive effects). Sure you can outrun him for a while, but he is unstoppable and while you tire, he never will. 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. https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/ 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.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Nice they have a hobby, but it is hardly the experience that using BeOS once was.
vitiral 4y ago
> Two things become clear with this chart... Second, the trend is downward 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.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  There's a graph further down about this point. Both the minimum and the maximum appear to be dropping. Though especially with the minimum there might be recency bias at play here. It's not exactly a random sample of software we're looking at.
DannyBee 4y ago
The chart is interesting because it misses the important part - it covers time, but not adoption. 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)
- ohiovr 4y ago
  The article made me think of LMMS vrs Fruity Loops. I'm pretty sure a group of people sought out to make something like Fruity Loops because the launcher comes up searching for fruit. It has some fairly remarkable limitations and I was pleasantly surprised that the free version of Fruity works perfect for me on Linux and allows unrestricted midi export which is all I needed anyway. It was a little more than a issue of taste because they really did try to replicate it but probably lost interest due to the fact that Fruity isn't too hateful to buy and it doesn't keep abusing customers with subscriptions. They upgrade and people don't always have to get the upgrade. 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.
orbital223 4y ago
It's amusing that, according to the article, there has been a "compelling open source alternative to" twitter since 2016. Yet, the ending of the article is a request for the reader to share the article on... twitter.
- zupa-hu 4y ago
  Lol what a nugget! Summarizes the article pretty well.
- fsflover 4y ago
  Mastodon technically works pretty well but lacks sufficient marketing and suffers from the network effect.
  - mikestaub 4y ago
    It's not marketing imo, it's the type of social network. What made linkedin and facebook take off was the fact that you follow people in your real social network. Almost all my twitter followers/followees I've never met, so there is not really a viral growth coefficient.
Axsuul 4y ago
Lots of wrong assumptions here but the most egregious of them all: > 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.
- fsloth 4y ago
  Indeed! Especially big corps seem to prefer software with clear licensing terms and a capability to license software for organization at scale. In that competition the software with better licensing options win, not the cheaper one necessarily. 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.
balaji1 4y ago
There is a reverse transition to monetize the open-source versions with a hosted-service also. Lot more products being built "in the open" these days. 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.
bawolff 4y ago
The table is questionable. Firefox isnt an alternative to netscape, its literally a fork. Why is 7zip the alternative to winzip and not gzip? Etc
vouaobrasil 4y ago
I feel like there's one area where open-source cannot universally replace closed-source: complex products that need to be extremely polished. Some people might be able to swap, but not everyone. An example is the desktop: I've used Linux for over a decade and still do but I recently added an M1 Mac and the hardware+software is just so much better for certain kinds of content creation. Video editing is another. I've tried a dozen video editors and while Shotcut is one of the best open-source ones, it's blown away by Davinci Resolve. 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.
aetherspawn 4y ago
Not on that list, an actual open-source alternative to Confluence and JIRA, and all of its features/plugins :( 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)
gregmac 4y ago
> all software will be open source 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.
- musicale 4y ago
  Most app store revenue comes from games. Some games (such as some puzzle games) are easy to clone and replace, but many are not. More energy seems to be put into emulation of proprietary games than creation of new open source games.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Because users actually pay for games.
  - melagonster 4y ago
    game is a artwork, artists don't work like programmers, so currently open source mode don't work for them.
- bruce511 4y ago
  I completely agree. We operate in a space where we rent out our proprietary software to businesses to solve a mundane business requirement. We wrote our own software. 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.
egypturnash 4y ago
It has been about 35 years since Illustrator was released and IMHO it still does a lot of things that Inkscape can't do. "Time Till High Quality Open Source Alternative" for that one is about 12.7k days and counting. 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.
hintymad 4y ago
There could be an open source alternative to our software, yet it will be much harder to have an economically competitive open source alternative to systems or workflows. Amazon's Open Search Service, for instance, is just a control plane on top of Open Search (and Elasticsearch some time ago), yet so many companies flock to the service because they simply do not want to be bothered with manning a search service.
00s_enthusiast 4y ago
The trend towards the open source replacement appearing faster and faster is intriguing. Yet, the fundamental reason for software simping still applies: Herd people don't go with what's free, they go with what's popular.
paulryanrogers 4y ago
This rings true for all my personal products. Last one I built and soft launched quietly. Then within a year there was a FOSS project covering the same killer feature, that none of my commercial competitors had (or have yet). Previous product had a FOSS alternative within six months.
woleium 4y ago
it happens the other way too. I used to contribute to a small ssl VPN project (adito) that was 'aquired' by barracuda networks. It was forked and picked up by OpenVPN (as openvpn-als) but development stopped. I believe it's still updated internally and forms part of Barracudas firewall offering.
3np 4y ago
I like to think of this as a paradigm shift from businesses focusing on vertical integration where the same entity develops and maintains client- and server-side software and infrastructure and acts as the sole service provider, to a separation of service providers and software maintainers. It's a natural consequence of specialization and commoditization. We're already seeing this in cloud computing and databases. Case in point from OP: Dokku/Heroku. There is no reason why Dokku should have been a threat to Heroku. Ideally open-source tooling should only serve to strengthen someone like Heroku (whether they would have continued as a PaaS or pivoted to selling their software or other services around it). For a more recent example, I think the window for introducing another Netlify under the same model on the same scale is closing. 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.
anonymoushn 4y ago
I'm excitedly awaiting the open source alternative to Oodle!
peeters 4y ago
It'd be interesting to follow up each of these entries with what actually superceded the original in terms of market share. "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.
donio 4y ago
Netscape Navigator -> Mosaic: -692 days Slack -> IRC: -9102 days Yeah, I know that there are obvious feature differences but the list also has entries like BitKeeper -> Git and ManyCam -> OBS which are just as skewed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
AlbertCory 4y ago
I was just talking to another ex-Googler today, and he has a simple explanation for why products keep getting worse (especially Google's, but not just them): 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.
AdamH12113 4y ago
Having heard this kind of argument since the late 90s, I’m amused that it’s three HN links up from GIMP finally getting some CMYK support after ~25 years.
keepquestioning 4y ago
Waiting for an open source GPU
legulere 4y ago
If you look at the list something becomes obvious: it’s mostly software used by other programmers. If the software isn’t directly targeted at software developers like gimp is, there will be less success. If you look a B2B Software software developers never will use, often there exist no open source solutions.
emrah 4y ago
Being an alternative does not mean one product will replace another. GIMP will never replace or kill Photoshop. It will be an alternative sure, like tea, coffee, beer are alternatives/substitutes for water. 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.
zaroth 4y ago
I’m confused… 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.
indus 4y ago
Whoever the eff wrote this is an effing genius. I have been thinking about this for sometime how majority of the saas businesses will be taken over by oss. Saw this first hand in server software. But the analysis done and the tabulated view and chart blew my mind. Very well articulated.
ouid 4y ago
The trend is downward because of how a proprietary technology released 3 years ago cannot have had its time to open source be 5 years.
- JoshMcguigan 4y ago
  I agree with you, but the article does address this point.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    Incorrectly.
kristopolous 4y ago
The methodology is really flawed. 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 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox Here's a video of the use. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BwO4LP0wLbY 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.
parksy 4y ago
All power to the author and the passion for open source is admirable, I just don't think we'll be seeing a world in "a couple more decades" where all software will be open source. 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.
JodieBenitez 4y ago
> In the future – and maybe it’ll take a couple more decades – all software will be open source, and no one will make money with software. And I think that’s a good thing. 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.
jongjong 4y ago
It's an interesting article but I'm not sure that the conclusion is correct. The existence of a similar or superior open source solution does not guarantee that a proprietary solution will lose most of its users to that open source alternative; especially if there are network effects at play. 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.
woevdbz 4y ago
Bad metric, bad methodology, survivor bias... I'm still expecting a kick-ass open source video editor or digital audio workstation any day now...
zzo38computer 4y ago
Even if all software is open-source (which I doubt), that does not mean that nobody can earn money from it; there are still ways to earn money, too. 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)
Silverback_VII 4y ago
Until Women will get wet when they hear that you are an open source developer this will never be the case. You are better off hitting the gym instead of developing software for free.
- amelius 4y ago
  I suppose most FOSS developers have passed that level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
alkonaut 4y ago
How much market share did these alternatives take? 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.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  > Most software is boring niche business software. 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.
KronisLV 4y ago
> It won’t happen overnight, it will start out as a poor alternative, but slowly growing to become the robust and cheap (in fact, free!) solution that everyone uses. 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.
netmonk 4y ago
Why would it be wrong to earn money selling software ? Or why is it good that you earn less and less money for writing and publishing software ? I don’t get it. Working for free is the new normal ?
- opan 4y ago
  It's perhaps wrong because there is no limit on supply, infinite copies can be made. To charge for such a thing doesn't reflect the cost to make or acquire the software. 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.
  - netmonk 4y ago
    There is a limit to supply: the number of hardware unit able to run it. 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)
bjornsing 4y ago
I can’t help feeling like we engineers are shooting ourselves in the foot with the open source culture: Most challenging and interesting work is turning into unpaid (open source) hobby projects. Professional software engineering is more and more about cobbling together various open source software, fiddling with configuration files and other menial tasks. Also, where is my “open source lawyer” or “open source doctor” whose work I can download from GitHub for free and file my issues / complaints with there? 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.)
- titoCA321 4y ago
  Many law firms and lawyers offer pro-bono services to those that qualify. There are even lawyers and law firms that contribute to open-source organizations on legal matters regarding lawsuits and licensing. Many court motions and filings are accessible to the public if you visit the courthouse and there are organizations that make case proceedings publicly available on their public websites. 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.
newbieuser 4y ago
I don't understand what you want to explain in the monetization part. For example, things like hasura, supabase are open source. but they can make money by selling their own services. and there are other examples like this. I think the author's point of view is too romantic
kybernetyk 4y ago
Many of those alternatives aren't really an alternative a professional would use.
heisenbit 4y ago
The analysis has a gap when it comes to products vs. solutions. A lot of problems these days are not solved by a big product but by integrating smaller often open source building blocks. Solutions that preempt products (or are never turned into products). The products of old and the market they lived in were different. It is not just that open source grew with respect to capabilities - the other side shrank too.
npteljes 4y ago
>Open source is coming for your business. It is just a matter of time before there exists a compelling open source alternative to your software. 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.
i_am_proteus 4y ago
>Sublime... Atom https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/ https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/ What's the "Time Til Open Source Alternative Abandoned?"
zvr 4y ago
On the first row of the table, the Open Source Alternative to Unix should be BSD Unix, released in 1979.
einpoklum 4y ago
> It is just a matter of time before there exists a compelling open source alternative to your software 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".
sylware 4y ago
weird, most of the web alternatives there are not noscript/basic (x)html friendly. For instance, I cannot even browse the directory of owncast! Peertube gives me a blank page. Google financed blink/geeko or apple financed webkit only for those alternatives... :(
hiccuphippo 4y ago
Next I want to see the TTASC. Time till Amazon SaaS Clone.
nothrowaways 4y ago
Matlab OSS equivalent is octave
curious_cat_163 4y ago
Assertion 1: "All software will be open source, " Assertion 2: "and no one will make money with software." 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.
cristiioan 4y ago
The way he calculated this duration is wrong. He associated FossCord as a Discord alternative, but Matrix was the true discord alternative.
wellbehaved 4y ago
I think open source is a kind of compensation for the fact that our political economy doesn't create meritocracies, analogous to how when one part of your body is injured some other part compensates. The compensation isn't "good" in the sense that it's bad to be injured and therefore to need it, but without the compensation things would be even worse.
benreesman 4y ago
I think this hinges a great deal on how strict the definition of OSS is. 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.
analog31 4y ago
I doubt there's a single reason for the staying power of proprietary software, that explains all of the examples. But here are some of my thoughts: 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.
rajko_rad 4y ago
Wow this is awesome data! I wrote about this trend at some point last year btw: https://rajko-rad.medium.com/the-rise-of-open-source-challengers-4a3d93932425 https://rajko-rad.medium.com/the-rise-of-open-source-challen...
jldugger 4y ago
what happens when the trend crosses into negative territory? Do we start calling it "time to commercialization?"
ThinkBeat 4y ago
The first edition of windows came out in 1985. Since then, 1000s of software developers have been busy developing new versions and features. (some hit, some miss) With a major redesign in 1993 have worked on it and 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.
ChrisLomont 4y ago
>Second, the trend is downward. 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?

500 points by feross 4y ago

Open Cascade is not an (open source) alternative to AutoCAD. Also there is none. (people talk about OpenSCAD and FreeCAD but neither of them are comparable to AutoCAD).

fsloth 4y ago
Yes, this comparison is extremely weird. The author did not really do his homework. It's like saying libpng is a replacement for Photoshop. 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.
aothms 4y ago
True. Came here to say that. QCAD is somewhat of an alternative to AutoCAD. OpenCASCADE is a foss alternative to e.g ACIS or Parasolid. 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?)

iyedgivehead 4y ago

> Dogehouse.tv as an alternative Does he realize it is just a failed project by Ben Awad. The site didn't even stay up for a year.

Ygg2 4y ago

When is there going to be OSS alternative to Windows? No, Linux doesn't count. It's good for servers but terrible desktop experience.

glasshug 4y ago
Funnily enough, Linux may be one of the few projects in the "alternatives" column that _is_ viable :)
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  Well, until you want to run Photoshop or Ableton.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  Yeah. I've been hearing about Linux Desktop for the last 20 years. It's 31 year old. 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.
rvz 4y ago
Very good question. The answer doesn't exist today, unless somehow billions of dollars pours into ReactOS for it to be compatible with Windows 11, but another utopian and unrealistic chance of that happening. 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.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  I meant a modern GUI oriented OS that's stable (see glibc 2.36 breaking EAC and other apps*) and nice to develop for. 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.

Gigachad 4y ago

>All software will be open source, and no one will make money with software. 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.

TAForObvReasons 4y ago
This is very simple to understand: in the long run, price tends to marginal cost of production. Open source represents the logical endpoint: since marginal cost of software is ~0, the endpoint is something with price ~0. SaaS is a response, but open source is already chipping away at the low end. 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.
- jahewson 4y ago
  > in the long run, price tends to marginal cost of production 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.

dane-pgp 4y ago

> all software will be open source, and no one will make money with software. 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.

jacooper 4y ago
It doesn't even have to be that. Nextcloud is fully libre, yet its a company with income and profit.
- cyborgx7 4y ago
  Yes, but not from selling the software. Nextcloud makes money from hosting and support, exactly as the article lines out.
mananaysiempre 4y ago
Unglue[1] tried to do (roughly) this for books, but seems to have stagnated in the recent years, unfortunately. [1] https://unglue.it/ https://unglue.it/

sidlls 4y ago

Only a scant handful of the open source alternatives in that table (Linux, git, gitlab, audacity, vlc media player) are compelling, if we use some measure of adoption as compelling. Most of the rest are all but unknown or so sparsely used as to be negligible compared to the software they supposedly displaced or will displace. 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.

Gigachad 4y ago
I don't think the problem is that the development is agenda driven. It's more that the "last 10%" of work takes 99% of the effort. These alternatives look very good on a checkbox list but when you actually try to use them they just don't hold up and the work to get them there is immense. It's why almost relevant software has an army of workers behind them and more than just developers. A few devs on there own are never going to be able to keep up.
- sidlls 4y ago
  I think our points are aligned. The agenda driven nature of the genesis of these alternatives is part of the reason few developers work on them. Which, as you note, is why the “last 10%” doesn’t get done.
- k__ 4y ago
  Reminds me of an app I build. 4 screens for the main tasks 12 screens for onboarding
pjmlp 4y ago
Yes, it is the hippie culture of the 70's community gardens and such applied to software, eventually everyone went to Wall Street and similar places during the 80's. Similarly, after the FOSS wave, we are now back at models similar to shareware and demoware, because guess what, money is important.
4y ago

kuon 4y ago

While I am a big proponent of open source, a few are not good enough yet. The most important one being CAD. No CAD is good enough for serious mechanical engineering except commercial ones. The creative software (GIMP, inkscape) can replace Adobe but they are much harder yo use with worse integration between them. In the other direction, some OSS software are just way better than the commercial solution (I'd put OBS in those).

deleted 4y ago
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wizzledonker 4y ago
My recent experience with OpenCASCADE is that since the new FUSE algorithm was introduced for Boolean operations with fuzzy values [0] the library itself is definitely up to par for professional use. (Although it’s unfortunate that many API entry points do not advertise their newer versions, and many developers end up using slower, legacy algorithms). Recent development trajectory on OpenCASCADE has been quite impressive. 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 https://dev.opencascade.org/content/fuzzy-boolean-operations [1] https://discourse.shapr3d.com/t/shapr3d-3-0-is-here-and-it-s-changing-the-cad-landscape/1826 https://discourse.shapr3d.com/t/shapr3d-3-0-is-here-and-it-s... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536518
jacooper 4y ago
Its seems in general anything Creative, FOSS struggles at.
owly 4y ago
Good examples. OBS is definitely superior. As much as I would like open source creative software, I recommend the closed source Affinity Photo and Designer as Adobe alternatives. Very inexpensive and extremely simple to use.

vikramkr 4y ago

It is unsurprising to me that any software that was launched within the last couple years that also has an open source alternative would have had that open source alternative developed in less than a couple years time... (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)

contravariant 4y ago

That graph with the green 'blind spot' deserves some praise. A lot of people might have missed the (in hindsight) obvious censoring problem with the data and just ran with the conclusion that the duration is decreasing rapidly.

albertop 4y ago

I have yet to see open source alternative with UX that is better than original.

tuatoru 4y ago
bash(1) has a better UX than the original sh(1).
jefftk 4y ago
Firefox > IE (introduced tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking)
landofredwater 4y ago
I'd argue in favor of Blender. While complex, it uses very strong features and gives you lots of freedom to do as you wish.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Blender is not a clone of anything, it started as commercial product.

fallat 4y ago

Nice to see some data 2 years later to back this up https://ecc-comp.blogspot.com/2020/08/80-of-software-is-useless-other-20-is.html https://ecc-comp.blogspot.com/2020/08/80-of-software-is-usel...

IncRnd 4y ago
The first example in that doc is Sublime Text. "Unfortunately the only thing going for Sublime was that it was first-to-market with a few novel ideas, most notably multiple cursor editing." That was clearly written by someone who hadn't used Sublime. 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.

rvz 4y ago

> All software will be open source, and no one will make money with software. 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.

magpi3 4y ago
> 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. 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.
r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
This is only a utopian claim if you are a software developer who does not need to make money to live. Otherwise it's utterly dystopian and essentially reduces the developer to a provider of free labour. I sometimes think that open source is the greatest trick that late stage capitalism ever pulled.
- amelius 4y ago
  > I sometimes think that open source is the greatest trick that late stage capitalism ever pulled. Don't let Stallman hear that.

needle0 4y ago

What exactly is "software" though? Is it just the code, or does it include the whole tech infrastructure that runs it, or even all the business agreements that makes the service possible and makes it all available to the end user? For the average user, the perception of software is increasingly shifting towards the third definition. 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!

cratermoon 4y ago

Interestingly, this list mostly covers desktop applications and social media. There's a couple of outliers, like Linux, the Siri and Google translate alternatives, but I noticed many missing categories. Relational databases, accounting & tax preparation, CRM, document management, and so on.

IncRnd 4y ago

In many cases I use opensource. In a few instances I want a company that supports their products, makes bug-fixes, and is responsive to the concerns and needs of my company. In yet other cases, I need to prove the utility and deterministic longevity of software without philosophical arguments. Yes, much software that is opensource is not as good as for-profit software.

magpi3 4y ago

I have thought this for a while. Open Source/Free software is like the Jason Voorhees in those old Friday the 13th movies (although with more positive effects). Sure you can outrun him for a while, but he is unstoppable and while you tire, he never will. 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. https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/ 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.

pjmlp 4y ago
Nice they have a hobby, but it is hardly the experience that using BeOS once was.

vitiral 4y ago

> Two things become clear with this chart... Second, the trend is downward 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.

wongarsu 4y ago
There's a graph further down about this point. Both the minimum and the maximum appear to be dropping. Though especially with the minimum there might be recency bias at play here. It's not exactly a random sample of software we're looking at.

DannyBee 4y ago

The chart is interesting because it misses the important part - it covers time, but not adoption. 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)

ohiovr 4y ago
The article made me think of LMMS vrs Fruity Loops. I'm pretty sure a group of people sought out to make something like Fruity Loops because the launcher comes up searching for fruit. It has some fairly remarkable limitations and I was pleasantly surprised that the free version of Fruity works perfect for me on Linux and allows unrestricted midi export which is all I needed anyway. It was a little more than a issue of taste because they really did try to replicate it but probably lost interest due to the fact that Fruity isn't too hateful to buy and it doesn't keep abusing customers with subscriptions. They upgrade and people don't always have to get the upgrade. 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.

orbital223 4y ago

It's amusing that, according to the article, there has been a "compelling open source alternative to" twitter since 2016. Yet, the ending of the article is a request for the reader to share the article on... twitter.

zupa-hu 4y ago
Lol what a nugget! Summarizes the article pretty well.
fsflover 4y ago
Mastodon technically works pretty well but lacks sufficient marketing and suffers from the network effect.
- mikestaub 4y ago
  It's not marketing imo, it's the type of social network. What made linkedin and facebook take off was the fact that you follow people in your real social network. Almost all my twitter followers/followees I've never met, so there is not really a viral growth coefficient.

Axsuul 4y ago

Lots of wrong assumptions here but the most egregious of them all: > 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.

fsloth 4y ago
Indeed! Especially big corps seem to prefer software with clear licensing terms and a capability to license software for organization at scale. In that competition the software with better licensing options win, not the cheaper one necessarily. 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.

balaji1 4y ago

There is a reverse transition to monetize the open-source versions with a hosted-service also. Lot more products being built "in the open" these days. 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.

bawolff 4y ago

The table is questionable. Firefox isnt an alternative to netscape, its literally a fork. Why is 7zip the alternative to winzip and not gzip? Etc

vouaobrasil 4y ago

I feel like there's one area where open-source cannot universally replace closed-source: complex products that need to be extremely polished. Some people might be able to swap, but not everyone. An example is the desktop: I've used Linux for over a decade and still do but I recently added an M1 Mac and the hardware+software is just so much better for certain kinds of content creation. Video editing is another. I've tried a dozen video editors and while Shotcut is one of the best open-source ones, it's blown away by Davinci Resolve. 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.

aetherspawn 4y ago

Not on that list, an actual open-source alternative to Confluence and JIRA, and all of its features/plugins :( 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)

gregmac 4y ago

> all software will be open source 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.

musicale 4y ago
Most app store revenue comes from games. Some games (such as some puzzle games) are easy to clone and replace, but many are not. More energy seems to be put into emulation of proprietary games than creation of new open source games.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Because users actually pay for games.
- melagonster 4y ago
  game is a artwork, artists don't work like programmers, so currently open source mode don't work for them.
bruce511 4y ago
I completely agree. We operate in a space where we rent out our proprietary software to businesses to solve a mundane business requirement. We wrote our own software. 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.

egypturnash 4y ago

It has been about 35 years since Illustrator was released and IMHO it still does a lot of things that Inkscape can't do. "Time Till High Quality Open Source Alternative" for that one is about 12.7k days and counting. 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.

hintymad 4y ago

There could be an open source alternative to our software, yet it will be much harder to have an economically competitive open source alternative to systems or workflows. Amazon's Open Search Service, for instance, is just a control plane on top of Open Search (and Elasticsearch some time ago), yet so many companies flock to the service because they simply do not want to be bothered with manning a search service.

00s_enthusiast 4y ago

The trend towards the open source replacement appearing faster and faster is intriguing. Yet, the fundamental reason for software simping still applies: Herd people don't go with what's free, they go with what's popular.

paulryanrogers 4y ago

This rings true for all my personal products. Last one I built and soft launched quietly. Then within a year there was a FOSS project covering the same killer feature, that none of my commercial competitors had (or have yet). Previous product had a FOSS alternative within six months.

woleium 4y ago

it happens the other way too. I used to contribute to a small ssl VPN project (adito) that was 'aquired' by barracuda networks. It was forked and picked up by OpenVPN (as openvpn-als) but development stopped. I believe it's still updated internally and forms part of Barracudas firewall offering.

3np 4y ago

I like to think of this as a paradigm shift from businesses focusing on vertical integration where the same entity develops and maintains client- and server-side software and infrastructure and acts as the sole service provider, to a separation of service providers and software maintainers. It's a natural consequence of specialization and commoditization. We're already seeing this in cloud computing and databases. Case in point from OP: Dokku/Heroku. There is no reason why Dokku should have been a threat to Heroku. Ideally open-source tooling should only serve to strengthen someone like Heroku (whether they would have continued as a PaaS or pivoted to selling their software or other services around it). For a more recent example, I think the window for introducing another Netlify under the same model on the same scale is closing. 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.

anonymoushn 4y ago

I'm excitedly awaiting the open source alternative to Oodle!

peeters 4y ago

It'd be interesting to follow up each of these entries with what actually superceded the original in terms of market share. "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.

donio 4y ago

Netscape Navigator -> Mosaic: -692 days Slack -> IRC: -9102 days Yeah, I know that there are obvious feature differences but the list also has entries like BitKeeper -> Git and ManyCam -> OBS which are just as skewed.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

AlbertCory 4y ago

I was just talking to another ex-Googler today, and he has a simple explanation for why products keep getting worse (especially Google's, but not just them): 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.

AdamH12113 4y ago

Having heard this kind of argument since the late 90s, I’m amused that it’s three HN links up from GIMP finally getting some CMYK support after ~25 years.

keepquestioning 4y ago

Waiting for an open source GPU

legulere 4y ago

If you look at the list something becomes obvious: it’s mostly software used by other programmers. If the software isn’t directly targeted at software developers like gimp is, there will be less success. If you look a B2B Software software developers never will use, often there exist no open source solutions.

emrah 4y ago

Being an alternative does not mean one product will replace another. GIMP will never replace or kill Photoshop. It will be an alternative sure, like tea, coffee, beer are alternatives/substitutes for water. 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.

zaroth 4y ago

I’m confused… 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.

indus 4y ago

Whoever the eff wrote this is an effing genius. I have been thinking about this for sometime how majority of the saas businesses will be taken over by oss. Saw this first hand in server software. But the analysis done and the tabulated view and chart blew my mind. Very well articulated.

ouid 4y ago

The trend is downward because of how a proprietary technology released 3 years ago cannot have had its time to open source be 5 years.

JoshMcguigan 4y ago
I agree with you, but the article does address this point.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  Incorrectly.

kristopolous 4y ago

The methodology is really flawed. 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 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox Here's a video of the use. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BwO4LP0wLbY 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.

parksy 4y ago

All power to the author and the passion for open source is admirable, I just don't think we'll be seeing a world in "a couple more decades" where all software will be open source. 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.

JodieBenitez 4y ago

> In the future – and maybe it’ll take a couple more decades – all software will be open source, and no one will make money with software. And I think that’s a good thing. 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.

jongjong 4y ago

It's an interesting article but I'm not sure that the conclusion is correct. The existence of a similar or superior open source solution does not guarantee that a proprietary solution will lose most of its users to that open source alternative; especially if there are network effects at play. 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.

woevdbz 4y ago

Bad metric, bad methodology, survivor bias... I'm still expecting a kick-ass open source video editor or digital audio workstation any day now...

zzo38computer 4y ago

Even if all software is open-source (which I doubt), that does not mean that nobody can earn money from it; there are still ways to earn money, too. 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)

Silverback_VII 4y ago

Until Women will get wet when they hear that you are an open source developer this will never be the case. You are better off hitting the gym instead of developing software for free.

amelius 4y ago
I suppose most FOSS developers have passed that level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

alkonaut 4y ago

How much market share did these alternatives take? 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.

tluyben2 4y ago
> Most software is boring niche business software. 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.

KronisLV 4y ago

> It won’t happen overnight, it will start out as a poor alternative, but slowly growing to become the robust and cheap (in fact, free!) solution that everyone uses. 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.

netmonk 4y ago

Why would it be wrong to earn money selling software ? Or why is it good that you earn less and less money for writing and publishing software ? I don’t get it. Working for free is the new normal ?

opan 4y ago
It's perhaps wrong because there is no limit on supply, infinite copies can be made. To charge for such a thing doesn't reflect the cost to make or acquire the software. 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.
- netmonk 4y ago
  There is a limit to supply: the number of hardware unit able to run it. 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)

bjornsing 4y ago

I can’t help feeling like we engineers are shooting ourselves in the foot with the open source culture: Most challenging and interesting work is turning into unpaid (open source) hobby projects. Professional software engineering is more and more about cobbling together various open source software, fiddling with configuration files and other menial tasks. Also, where is my “open source lawyer” or “open source doctor” whose work I can download from GitHub for free and file my issues / complaints with there? 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.)

titoCA321 4y ago
Many law firms and lawyers offer pro-bono services to those that qualify. There are even lawyers and law firms that contribute to open-source organizations on legal matters regarding lawsuits and licensing. Many court motions and filings are accessible to the public if you visit the courthouse and there are organizations that make case proceedings publicly available on their public websites. 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.

newbieuser 4y ago

I don't understand what you want to explain in the monetization part. For example, things like hasura, supabase are open source. but they can make money by selling their own services. and there are other examples like this. I think the author's point of view is too romantic

kybernetyk 4y ago

Many of those alternatives aren't really an alternative a professional would use.

heisenbit 4y ago

The analysis has a gap when it comes to products vs. solutions. A lot of problems these days are not solved by a big product but by integrating smaller often open source building blocks. Solutions that preempt products (or are never turned into products). The products of old and the market they lived in were different. It is not just that open source grew with respect to capabilities - the other side shrank too.

npteljes 4y ago

>Open source is coming for your business. It is just a matter of time before there exists a compelling open source alternative to your software. 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.

i_am_proteus 4y ago

>Sublime... Atom https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/ https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/ What's the "Time Til Open Source Alternative Abandoned?"

zvr 4y ago

On the first row of the table, the Open Source Alternative to Unix should be BSD Unix, released in 1979.

einpoklum 4y ago

> It is just a matter of time before there exists a compelling open source alternative to your software 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".

sylware 4y ago

weird, most of the web alternatives there are not noscript/basic (x)html friendly. For instance, I cannot even browse the directory of owncast! Peertube gives me a blank page. Google financed blink/geeko or apple financed webkit only for those alternatives... :(

hiccuphippo 4y ago

Next I want to see the TTASC. Time till Amazon SaaS Clone.

nothrowaways 4y ago

Matlab OSS equivalent is octave

curious_cat_163 4y ago

Assertion 1: "All software will be open source, " Assertion 2: "and no one will make money with software." 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.

cristiioan 4y ago

The way he calculated this duration is wrong. He associated FossCord as a Discord alternative, but Matrix was the true discord alternative.

wellbehaved 4y ago

I think open source is a kind of compensation for the fact that our political economy doesn't create meritocracies, analogous to how when one part of your body is injured some other part compensates. The compensation isn't "good" in the sense that it's bad to be injured and therefore to need it, but without the compensation things would be even worse.

benreesman 4y ago

I think this hinges a great deal on how strict the definition of OSS is. 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.

analog31 4y ago

I doubt there's a single reason for the staying power of proprietary software, that explains all of the examples. But here are some of my thoughts: 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.

rajko_rad 4y ago

Wow this is awesome data! I wrote about this trend at some point last year btw: https://rajko-rad.medium.com/the-rise-of-open-source-challengers-4a3d93932425 https://rajko-rad.medium.com/the-rise-of-open-source-challen...

jldugger 4y ago

what happens when the trend crosses into negative territory? Do we start calling it "time to commercialization?"

ThinkBeat 4y ago

The first edition of windows came out in 1985. Since then, 1000s of software developers have been busy developing new versions and features. (some hit, some miss) With a major redesign in 1993 have worked on it and 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.

ChrisLomont 4y ago

>Second, the trend is downward. 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?