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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 incre

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.
travisjungroth 4y ago
I have this hunch you could break into product management by product managing open source projects. You'd certainly learn some good skills if you could do it. It would be pure influence over authority.
- smegsicle 4y ago
  if you can herd a cat, you can herd a sheep
  - nine_k 4y ago
    They require different approaches. The best way to herd cats is by a laser pointer: show a clear, shining goal, and you don't need to give more directions. With sheep, you need to run circles around them and so drive their formidable grass-cutting capacity where you want it to be, slowly.
    - rapnie 4y ago
      Nice analogy. I like that. For the laser you likely need to show an indicator for the distance to the bright red spot, and break it into measurable chunks (like a roadmap) to which actionable steps can be attached. Tbh a cat won't do anything with that, but to the feline breed of FOSS developers it may help to keep (and understand the importance of) product focus. Although you might just focus the bright spot on farther away objectives when the felines get closer to it, to refocus their attention.
      - JonChesterfield 4y ago
        Bright light in the distance works for me. A lot of the interest is in the path finding process - dead ends and cycles included. A bright light in the distance that someone else has broken into measurable chunks is totally unappealing.
      - lstodd 4y ago
        Like JC said - you can shove your roadmaps where you like, many people contribute exactly because they're sick of roadmaps and product foci.
bsder 4y ago
> For example, adoption of GIMP has not likely materially increased over time (as a relative percent of total addressable market) This is an interesting question to me because Adobe only recently moved to cloud/subscription fairly recently. Before that, you could get a physical copy of Photoshop and keep it running forever. As that pathway fades, it will be interesting to see if something will finally supplant Photoshop.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  Hasn't it been a full decade since the last perpetually licensed Photoshop?
  - eru 4y ago
    I guess five years ago you could still easily use a five year old pirated photoshop?
    - sircastor 4y ago
      We have a legit PS install on my wife’s machine and it’s preventing us from making a move to another computer for her. She’s a casual/non-professional user. She knows the app and how to use it. We aren’t interested in renting the app… basically we’re holding out on that machine, but sooner or later it’s going to become a security risk in our network.
      - Lammy 4y ago
        This is why I still use Photoshop CS3. It's the newest version Adobe have released as an activation-free offline installer, and it does everything I need and then some.
      - piperswe 4y ago
        At some point it might be worth looking into Affinity Photo, it's a $55 (one-time, with free updates) cross-platform photo manipulation program with surprising feature parity with Photoshop.
hiptobecubic 4y ago
This is also why Google sucks at so many things, despite having the best offering on paper. GCP is honestly great, but a terrible product. Stadia? Zillion chat apps? Google Inbox by Gmail by Google? Google wallet pay Android pay wallet? They all work great and would be best in class if they were decent products and you could figure out how to get them to work at all.
- threatofrain 4y ago
  Why is GCP bad?
  - dasz 4y ago
    I think the usual retort is that at any moment and for any inexplicable reason your entire infrastructure can be deleted for some reason you barely know let alone comprehend. This seems to be the case for apps at least. I neither support nor deny this belief but it's an increasingly common impression.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - lokar 4y ago
    GCP tends to be designed for customers that are staffed with mostly Google engineers.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      Source? This comment seems absurd, at best. I am no 'google engineer' (is that supposed to be a bad thing?) and I've been using and loving GCP for well over a decade. Built several extremely successful businesses on it.
      - jack_pp 4y ago
        I suspect that if at some point you had an issue with it you would've been frustrated as hell by your inability to do anything about it and would've sworn them off forever. But you were the survivor that didn't have issues and can't seem to comprehend that as a business it is absurd to rely on a company that can kill you off without reason or recourse because you were the unlucky one that pissed off the algorithm. You're right, it is FUD, but it's not malicious FUD spread by us to spite google, it is actually rational FUD based on real reports that is entirely google's fault
rr808 4y ago
> de-facto market-leader, they are mostly infrastructure Maybe its technical users? Even linux is used by IT pros rather than regular people. I think tech people just dont like paying for anything.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Those of us that realise our salaries must come out from somewhere, do like paying others for the work we profit from.
  - joshmanders 4y ago
    I think the correlation of people who don't like paying for things and engineers are because most engineers are people who learned computers at a young age and found piracy, etc as their goto way to learn things because I know I couldn't afford Macromedia Dreamweaver when I was a kid, but I used it... So now most think "why would I pay when I can pirate or use an alternative that is a pain to setup but once you get over that initial pain, it's smooth sailing" whereas others are like "I don't have time nor desire to do that, just take my $10/mo" I personally stopped pirating and started paying for stuff for the same reasons you stated, and also because I felt like a hypocrite expecting people to pay me for my work, when I wouldn't pay others for their work.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Exactly that.
    - ksec 4y ago
      That is why I think most software should have an educational license that allow students to freely use their product. I mean even Steve Jobs said it on stage, no one pays for Adobe Photoshop in college. LOL
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        Most relevant software does have such licenses, that is how I used to buy Borland software.
surajrmal 4y ago
I think the key here is that open source infrastructure is often built and maintained by companies, while open source products are not. It takes time and effort to make things successful and companies have resources to make things useful that motivated groups of volunteers do not.
ksec 4y ago
>open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure. (and pretty good at infrastructure products). Oh This is Great. Thank You. Will have to bookmark your comment. Perfectly describe something I have in my mind but couldn't quite put it into precise wordings. Open Source works, and its desired in infrastructure because everyone relies on them. And its common interest align with everyone. If we look at the all the success we have in Open Source, most of them are not even on the list. SQLite, MySQL / Postgres, all the Networking Libraries, WebKit / Blink, FFmpeg, GNU Compiler / LLVM, Apache / Nginx etc, etc. Not only are they the dominant position or with substantial market share, they are also all infrastructure related.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  It's because open-source favors "those who show up and code" (I recall a blog post about the Apache Foundation saying that was what they valued). If you can't code, but you can make UI/UX suggestions, or come up with a way to productize the raw codebase, you're usually ignored or (worse) mistaken for a coder and people ask you when you'll have a PR ready.
cryptonector 4y ago
Infrastructure has a bit of a tragedy of the commons thing going on. No one wants to pay for everyone else's infrastructure. So any software project that is infrastructure tends to suffer from lack of funding, whether it be proprietary software or open source. There are exceptions, naturally. E.g., PostgreSQL and SQLite, and Linux. To overcome the tragedy of the commons you need tons of interest and community. Everyone who contributes has to feel like they're getting their money's worth and that there's no better way. I.e., mindshare matters. Mindshare matters whether the thing is open source or proprietary.
- pronlover723 4y ago
  Is there any place there are actual statistics on this. Say the top 10k most used open source projects across languages where each project has the amount of money spent to maintain it / the number of people hours needed to maintain it and where the maintainers care to be remunerated? I really don't know which open source projects are under funded. Firefox, Python, LLVM, Clang, .NET, Chromium, Electron, VSCode are certainly adequately funded. There are also projects like some of my own that have a few 100 or 1000 users but I don't need/want funding for them. Maybe if they got 10k or 100k users and I actually got lots of support requests that would change. I'm sure there are several under funded projects but it'd be nice to see some qualitative data instead of just feeling it must be true.
la_fayette 4y ago
This sometimes might be true, but there are many counterexamples. If you look at the web content management systems, the market is dominated by well-engineered open source CMS products, e.g., Drupal, ez Publish, typo3... Even for webshops this true: presta shop, opencart, ...
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Firefox, VLC, Signal, chromium, codium, veracrypt, ublock origin, bitwarden, ubuntu...
  - nickelpro 4y ago
    None of these are counter-examples to what the OP said > Not all, but the ones that aren't have clear product management of some sort. That's effectively all of these except maybe ublock. If you don't have someone trying to sell some portion of your code base, true community efforts not a commercial effort that happens to be OSS, you're probably an infrastructure project.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Firefox is made by a company. VLC has a product manager (who owns the VideoLAN Foundation).
    - klabb3 4y ago
      Signal and chromium as well. I am not sure about Ubuntu, but to me it looks like they have a product/design org. Blender would be another example. How are they run?
      - flohofwoe 4y ago
        Blender is a foundation: https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/ https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/
        4y ago
yobbo 4y ago
> open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure. Yes, but Android? When companies promote OSS products, they become successful. > totally orthogonal to building "a good product that people want to use" An OSS product will not end up on shelves with glitzy packaging for people to buy unless some company burns money to do that. It's not a fundamental law and OSS isn't orthogonal to anything.
- surajrmal 4y ago
  AOSP is not a product and is not really usable by itself. It needs to be combined with Gapps and Google play services to really be considered a product. And I would argue that combination isn't a consumer facing product either. It's a product aimed at OEMs who combine it with their hardware and a few layers of additional hardware integration in order to create a consumer facing product. I know there are open source alternatives that replace many of these proprietary layers but they aren't very popular with the market.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I'd argue, and think GIMP is a good example, that products can fight off open source alternative adoption by being free to certain groups. Piracy, student discounts, shareware, limited trials. You could still consider this a win for open source, as it stops market abuse and restricts those paying to the people who depend on the software for business reasons and who haven't had their trust sufficiently broken that they switch over to open source to prevent abuse (which is the story in infrastructure, you're basically a sharecropper if you're building on non-open source infra).
- dotancohen 4y ago
  That is not a win for open source because reducing payments is not a goal of open source. Assured continuation of availability and ownership of user's data is the explicit goal of the FOSS movement as stated by RMS. That means that it will continue to run on your hardware, and won't lock your data, and you can fix the bugs and suit it to your purpose. Money was never the issue.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    RMS is on record as supporting BSD style licences for certain things because without them, proprietary software would have an even stronger stranglehold. https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3 https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3 So it's not totally black and white, there's tactics and strategy involved. The less money going to Adobe, the less power and control they have. If they can force you to pay, they can force you to do other things. If they can't force you to pay, then they can't force other things as well.
    - dotancohen 4y ago
      The corollary is that FOSS-induced e.g. "student versions" of Adobe software entrench vendor lockin, as the students learn only Adobe software.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    Richard Stallman’s personal philosophy does not define the goals of open source. There are many different people contributing to it for many different reasons, and yes, having free (as in non-paid) alternatives to proprietary software is one of the most prominent ones.
johnywalks 4y ago
> open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure Infrastructure you can trust. Most close sourced tech will lock you in and you're at their mercy - no thanks.
- dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
  Because this is, well, the very purpose of proprietary infrastructure: to lock you in. Today, it seems to exist mostly in places where people have no choice.
moonchrome 4y ago
Open source works when big players decide it's economical to comoditize something and do it in the open to share cost and get testing, also good will, etc. This is why it's mostly in infrastructure. But it works in product applications - like Epic contributing to Blender because it enables their platform.
fnord123 4y ago
You have a good point that we can start a discussion around but I think you're being overly negative and falling for survivor bias. E.g. Does the success of Photoshop mean proprietary product management is superior? Or does the death of Corel Draw mean it's doomed to failure? And Apple, everyone's favourite product company, has Pages and Numbers which are not better than OO (and Word's incumbency is vaguely illegal). So let's put that, and FOSS dominance in browsers and IDEs and databases and programming languages and media players to the side. FOSS could do with better product management: what would it look like? More roadmaps? More figma/inkscape mockups? More user interviews?
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
> it covers time, but not adoption. And you can't really cover "time" in an objective way before first determining some reasonable threshold for adoption, which is about as hard to objectively define as it gets. This means all the data presented in this article is basically meaningless. For example, _way_ before Github we already had open source code hosting & collaboration servers. Trac comes to mind, but there's an even better example -- Gitorious, which also came before Github. Why did the author not even consider these two examples and only named Gitlab es the "replacement" for Github ? I could understand the omission of Trac since perhaps it was not primarily Git-based, but Gitorious? Gitorious was even at one point the #1 Git platform, eventually surpassed in popularity by Github (and much, much later by Gitlab). Is this a "proprietary alternative replacing a open source one" ? How do you even take this into account in your "Time until OSS alternative" metric ? It just shows how meaningless this all is without a subjective definition of "alternative" or "replacement". There is no way to present this objectively as the authors are trying to do. The entire data set is manipulated to fit their point. The rest of "replacements" are similarly questionable or even ridiculous, because, depending on your definition, they either ignore alternatives that came much earlier (because surprisingly frequently a proprietary "service" replaces a popular open source program) or call a service "an alternative" when it is simply not.
maire 4y ago
Engineers continually discount the importance of usability. The easy applications to convert to open source are those that the developer of the application is the user of the application. The easiest example is Bitkeeper to GIT conversion. The person who wrote GIT is the same person who used Bitkeeper. Therefore he knew what would be usable for a developer. GIMP vs Blender is the counter example. Both GIMP and Blender are targeted at artists and not developers. The author assumes the awesomeness of Blender is inevitable. But GIMP is pretty bad and shows no evidence that it is getting better. Yet - when major animation studios decided to adopt Blender they dedicated UX resources to Blender to make it more usable for artists. When the developer is not the user, you need that extra step.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  > Engineers continually discount the importance of usability. The real issue, unfortunately, is worse: It's a lack of empathy for the user. Usability need no explaining to an engineer. You have your 500$ mechanical keyboard. You your carefully crafted .vscode and you lust for that e-ink monitor. Unfortunately, you don't understand that you are different to the average user of the thing you are working on and in that thing you are working on, your job is to serve the user. To be fair, this is not a struggle unique to engineers, far from it. Professions, that is very adamant about conveying this during training are teachers, therapists (and I explicitly don't include physicians, although they can be) and, to a wildly varying degree because of what the job means nowadays, designers. People working in most other professions default suck at this.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    This is also true. I get into arguments all the time with people who start by saying "Oh it's easy" and then after I prove that it's hard, say "I don't care that it's hard for other people". It's just a sort of blindness for your internal shortcutting of "I don't care that it's hard for others, it's easy for me" to "It's easy to everyone that matters" to "It's easy for everyone".
zeruch 4y ago
I was about to write about 80% of what you wrote, so Im glad I parsed the comments first (and GIMP & Krita were going to be my examples, as well as the AWS-ification of things like Elastic) but to me the real crux is "open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure".
grandrew 4y ago
Thank you for brilliant comment highligthing the OSS issues. But I believe you're missing the main point that OP is making: OSS will _statistically_ dominate every single niche. There are just more reasons why non-OSS software would cease to exist - so eventually Inkscape will become a de-facto standard for Illustrator things; Blender will become de-facto standard of all 3D-Max things; OBS will become a de-facto standard of all Macromedia Flash Broadcast ... oh wait ... did that happen already?

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.

travisjungroth 4y ago

I have this hunch you could break into product management by product managing open source projects. You'd certainly learn some good skills if you could do it. It would be pure influence over authority.

smegsicle 4y ago
if you can herd a cat, you can herd a sheep
- nine_k 4y ago
  They require different approaches. The best way to herd cats is by a laser pointer: show a clear, shining goal, and you don't need to give more directions. With sheep, you need to run circles around them and so drive their formidable grass-cutting capacity where you want it to be, slowly.
  - rapnie 4y ago
    Nice analogy. I like that. For the laser you likely need to show an indicator for the distance to the bright red spot, and break it into measurable chunks (like a roadmap) to which actionable steps can be attached. Tbh a cat won't do anything with that, but to the feline breed of FOSS developers it may help to keep (and understand the importance of) product focus. Although you might just focus the bright spot on farther away objectives when the felines get closer to it, to refocus their attention.
    - JonChesterfield 4y ago
      Bright light in the distance works for me. A lot of the interest is in the path finding process - dead ends and cycles included. A bright light in the distance that someone else has broken into measurable chunks is totally unappealing.
    - lstodd 4y ago
      Like JC said - you can shove your roadmaps where you like, many people contribute exactly because they're sick of roadmaps and product foci.

bsder 4y ago

> For example, adoption of GIMP has not likely materially increased over time (as a relative percent of total addressable market) This is an interesting question to me because Adobe only recently moved to cloud/subscription fairly recently. Before that, you could get a physical copy of Photoshop and keep it running forever. As that pathway fades, it will be interesting to see if something will finally supplant Photoshop.

zamadatix 4y ago
Hasn't it been a full decade since the last perpetually licensed Photoshop?
- eru 4y ago
  I guess five years ago you could still easily use a five year old pirated photoshop?
  - sircastor 4y ago
    We have a legit PS install on my wife’s machine and it’s preventing us from making a move to another computer for her. She’s a casual/non-professional user. She knows the app and how to use it. We aren’t interested in renting the app… basically we’re holding out on that machine, but sooner or later it’s going to become a security risk in our network.
    - Lammy 4y ago
      This is why I still use Photoshop CS3. It's the newest version Adobe have released as an activation-free offline installer, and it does everything I need and then some.
    - piperswe 4y ago
      At some point it might be worth looking into Affinity Photo, it's a $55 (one-time, with free updates) cross-platform photo manipulation program with surprising feature parity with Photoshop.

hiptobecubic 4y ago

This is also why Google sucks at so many things, despite having the best offering on paper. GCP is honestly great, but a terrible product. Stadia? Zillion chat apps? Google Inbox by Gmail by Google? Google wallet pay Android pay wallet? They all work great and would be best in class if they were decent products and you could figure out how to get them to work at all.

threatofrain 4y ago
Why is GCP bad?
- dasz 4y ago
  I think the usual retort is that at any moment and for any inexplicable reason your entire infrastructure can be deleted for some reason you barely know let alone comprehend. This seems to be the case for apps at least. I neither support nor deny this belief but it's an increasingly common impression.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- lokar 4y ago
  GCP tends to be designed for customers that are staffed with mostly Google engineers.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    Source? This comment seems absurd, at best. I am no 'google engineer' (is that supposed to be a bad thing?) and I've been using and loving GCP for well over a decade. Built several extremely successful businesses on it.
    - jack_pp 4y ago
      I suspect that if at some point you had an issue with it you would've been frustrated as hell by your inability to do anything about it and would've sworn them off forever. But you were the survivor that didn't have issues and can't seem to comprehend that as a business it is absurd to rely on a company that can kill you off without reason or recourse because you were the unlucky one that pissed off the algorithm. You're right, it is FUD, but it's not malicious FUD spread by us to spite google, it is actually rational FUD based on real reports that is entirely google's fault

rr808 4y ago

> de-facto market-leader, they are mostly infrastructure Maybe its technical users? Even linux is used by IT pros rather than regular people. I think tech people just dont like paying for anything.

pjmlp 4y ago
Those of us that realise our salaries must come out from somewhere, do like paying others for the work we profit from.
- joshmanders 4y ago
  I think the correlation of people who don't like paying for things and engineers are because most engineers are people who learned computers at a young age and found piracy, etc as their goto way to learn things because I know I couldn't afford Macromedia Dreamweaver when I was a kid, but I used it... So now most think "why would I pay when I can pirate or use an alternative that is a pain to setup but once you get over that initial pain, it's smooth sailing" whereas others are like "I don't have time nor desire to do that, just take my $10/mo" I personally stopped pirating and started paying for stuff for the same reasons you stated, and also because I felt like a hypocrite expecting people to pay me for my work, when I wouldn't pay others for their work.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Exactly that.
  - ksec 4y ago
    That is why I think most software should have an educational license that allow students to freely use their product. I mean even Steve Jobs said it on stage, no one pays for Adobe Photoshop in college. LOL
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Most relevant software does have such licenses, that is how I used to buy Borland software.

surajrmal 4y ago

I think the key here is that open source infrastructure is often built and maintained by companies, while open source products are not. It takes time and effort to make things successful and companies have resources to make things useful that motivated groups of volunteers do not.

ksec 4y ago

>open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure. (and pretty good at infrastructure products). Oh This is Great. Thank You. Will have to bookmark your comment. Perfectly describe something I have in my mind but couldn't quite put it into precise wordings. Open Source works, and its desired in infrastructure because everyone relies on them. And its common interest align with everyone. If we look at the all the success we have in Open Source, most of them are not even on the list. SQLite, MySQL / Postgres, all the Networking Libraries, WebKit / Blink, FFmpeg, GNU Compiler / LLVM, Apache / Nginx etc, etc. Not only are they the dominant position or with substantial market share, they are also all infrastructure related.

phendrenad2 4y ago
It's because open-source favors "those who show up and code" (I recall a blog post about the Apache Foundation saying that was what they valued). If you can't code, but you can make UI/UX suggestions, or come up with a way to productize the raw codebase, you're usually ignored or (worse) mistaken for a coder and people ask you when you'll have a PR ready.

cryptonector 4y ago

Infrastructure has a bit of a tragedy of the commons thing going on. No one wants to pay for everyone else's infrastructure. So any software project that is infrastructure tends to suffer from lack of funding, whether it be proprietary software or open source. There are exceptions, naturally. E.g., PostgreSQL and SQLite, and Linux. To overcome the tragedy of the commons you need tons of interest and community. Everyone who contributes has to feel like they're getting their money's worth and that there's no better way. I.e., mindshare matters. Mindshare matters whether the thing is open source or proprietary.

pronlover723 4y ago
Is there any place there are actual statistics on this. Say the top 10k most used open source projects across languages where each project has the amount of money spent to maintain it / the number of people hours needed to maintain it and where the maintainers care to be remunerated? I really don't know which open source projects are under funded. Firefox, Python, LLVM, Clang, .NET, Chromium, Electron, VSCode are certainly adequately funded. There are also projects like some of my own that have a few 100 or 1000 users but I don't need/want funding for them. Maybe if they got 10k or 100k users and I actually got lots of support requests that would change. I'm sure there are several under funded projects but it'd be nice to see some qualitative data instead of just feeling it must be true.

la_fayette 4y ago

This sometimes might be true, but there are many counterexamples. If you look at the web content management systems, the market is dominated by well-engineered open source CMS products, e.g., Drupal, ez Publish, typo3... Even for webshops this true: presta shop, opencart, ...

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Firefox, VLC, Signal, chromium, codium, veracrypt, ublock origin, bitwarden, ubuntu...
- nickelpro 4y ago
  None of these are counter-examples to what the OP said > Not all, but the ones that aren't have clear product management of some sort. That's effectively all of these except maybe ublock. If you don't have someone trying to sell some portion of your code base, true community efforts not a commercial effort that happens to be OSS, you're probably an infrastructure project.
- astrange 4y ago
  Firefox is made by a company. VLC has a product manager (who owns the VideoLAN Foundation).
  - klabb3 4y ago
    Signal and chromium as well. I am not sure about Ubuntu, but to me it looks like they have a product/design org. Blender would be another example. How are they run?
    - flohofwoe 4y ago
      Blender is a foundation: https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/ https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/
      - 4y ago

yobbo 4y ago

> open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure. Yes, but Android? When companies promote OSS products, they become successful. > totally orthogonal to building "a good product that people want to use" An OSS product will not end up on shelves with glitzy packaging for people to buy unless some company burns money to do that. It's not a fundamental law and OSS isn't orthogonal to anything.

surajrmal 4y ago
AOSP is not a product and is not really usable by itself. It needs to be combined with Gapps and Google play services to really be considered a product. And I would argue that combination isn't a consumer facing product either. It's a product aimed at OEMs who combine it with their hardware and a few layers of additional hardware integration in order to create a consumer facing product. I know there are open source alternatives that replace many of these proprietary layers but they aren't very popular with the market.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I'd argue, and think GIMP is a good example, that products can fight off open source alternative adoption by being free to certain groups. Piracy, student discounts, shareware, limited trials. You could still consider this a win for open source, as it stops market abuse and restricts those paying to the people who depend on the software for business reasons and who haven't had their trust sufficiently broken that they switch over to open source to prevent abuse (which is the story in infrastructure, you're basically a sharecropper if you're building on non-open source infra).

dotancohen 4y ago
That is not a win for open source because reducing payments is not a goal of open source. Assured continuation of availability and ownership of user's data is the explicit goal of the FOSS movement as stated by RMS. That means that it will continue to run on your hardware, and won't lock your data, and you can fix the bugs and suit it to your purpose. Money was never the issue.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  RMS is on record as supporting BSD style licences for certain things because without them, proprietary software would have an even stronger stranglehold. https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3 https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3 So it's not totally black and white, there's tactics and strategy involved. The less money going to Adobe, the less power and control they have. If they can force you to pay, they can force you to do other things. If they can't force you to pay, then they can't force other things as well.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    The corollary is that FOSS-induced e.g. "student versions" of Adobe software entrench vendor lockin, as the students learn only Adobe software.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Richard Stallman’s personal philosophy does not define the goals of open source. There are many different people contributing to it for many different reasons, and yes, having free (as in non-paid) alternatives to proprietary software is one of the most prominent ones.

johnywalks 4y ago

> open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure Infrastructure you can trust. Most close sourced tech will lock you in and you're at their mercy - no thanks.

dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
Because this is, well, the very purpose of proprietary infrastructure: to lock you in. Today, it seems to exist mostly in places where people have no choice.

moonchrome 4y ago

Open source works when big players decide it's economical to comoditize something and do it in the open to share cost and get testing, also good will, etc. This is why it's mostly in infrastructure. But it works in product applications - like Epic contributing to Blender because it enables their platform.

fnord123 4y ago

You have a good point that we can start a discussion around but I think you're being overly negative and falling for survivor bias. E.g. Does the success of Photoshop mean proprietary product management is superior? Or does the death of Corel Draw mean it's doomed to failure? And Apple, everyone's favourite product company, has Pages and Numbers which are not better than OO (and Word's incumbency is vaguely illegal). So let's put that, and FOSS dominance in browsers and IDEs and databases and programming languages and media players to the side. FOSS could do with better product management: what would it look like? More roadmaps? More figma/inkscape mockups? More user interviews?

AshamedCaptain 4y ago

> it covers time, but not adoption. And you can't really cover "time" in an objective way before first determining some reasonable threshold for adoption, which is about as hard to objectively define as it gets. This means all the data presented in this article is basically meaningless. For example, _way_ before Github we already had open source code hosting & collaboration servers. Trac comes to mind, but there's an even better example -- Gitorious, which also came before Github. Why did the author not even consider these two examples and only named Gitlab es the "replacement" for Github ? I could understand the omission of Trac since perhaps it was not primarily Git-based, but Gitorious? Gitorious was even at one point the #1 Git platform, eventually surpassed in popularity by Github (and much, much later by Gitlab). Is this a "proprietary alternative replacing a open source one" ? How do you even take this into account in your "Time until OSS alternative" metric ? It just shows how meaningless this all is without a subjective definition of "alternative" or "replacement". There is no way to present this objectively as the authors are trying to do. The entire data set is manipulated to fit their point. The rest of "replacements" are similarly questionable or even ridiculous, because, depending on your definition, they either ignore alternatives that came much earlier (because surprisingly frequently a proprietary "service" replaces a popular open source program) or call a service "an alternative" when it is simply not.

maire 4y ago

Engineers continually discount the importance of usability. The easy applications to convert to open source are those that the developer of the application is the user of the application. The easiest example is Bitkeeper to GIT conversion. The person who wrote GIT is the same person who used Bitkeeper. Therefore he knew what would be usable for a developer. GIMP vs Blender is the counter example. Both GIMP and Blender are targeted at artists and not developers. The author assumes the awesomeness of Blender is inevitable. But GIMP is pretty bad and shows no evidence that it is getting better. Yet - when major animation studios decided to adopt Blender they dedicated UX resources to Blender to make it more usable for artists. When the developer is not the user, you need that extra step.

jstummbillig 4y ago
> Engineers continually discount the importance of usability. The real issue, unfortunately, is worse: It's a lack of empathy for the user. Usability need no explaining to an engineer. You have your 500$ mechanical keyboard. You your carefully crafted .vscode and you lust for that e-ink monitor. Unfortunately, you don't understand that you are different to the average user of the thing you are working on and in that thing you are working on, your job is to serve the user. To be fair, this is not a struggle unique to engineers, far from it. Professions, that is very adamant about conveying this during training are teachers, therapists (and I explicitly don't include physicians, although they can be) and, to a wildly varying degree because of what the job means nowadays, designers. People working in most other professions default suck at this.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  This is also true. I get into arguments all the time with people who start by saying "Oh it's easy" and then after I prove that it's hard, say "I don't care that it's hard for other people". It's just a sort of blindness for your internal shortcutting of "I don't care that it's hard for others, it's easy for me" to "It's easy to everyone that matters" to "It's easy for everyone".

zeruch 4y ago

I was about to write about 80% of what you wrote, so Im glad I parsed the comments first (and GIMP & Krita were going to be my examples, as well as the AWS-ification of things like Elastic) but to me the real crux is "open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure".

grandrew 4y ago

Thank you for brilliant comment highligthing the OSS issues. But I believe you're missing the main point that OP is making: OSS will _statistically_ dominate every single niche. There are just more reasons why non-OSS software would cease to exist - so eventually Inkscape will become a de-facto standard for Illustrator things; Blender will become de-facto standard of all 3D-Max things; OBS will become a de-facto standard of all Macromedia Flash Broadcast ... oh wait ... did that happen already?