> How many paid products have an open source competitor at all? How many have a credible competitor (GIMP isn’t a credible alternative to PhotoShop for the peop

> How many paid products have an open source competitor at all? How many have a credible competitor (GIMP isn’t a credible alternative to PhotoShop for the people who pay for it for example). I'm not sure how we could figure out the numbers, but this just doesn't feel right. A lot of important and key paid products have open source alternatives. Some examples: * Windows/macOS -> Linux * Microsoft Office -> LibreOffice * Adobe Illustrator -> Inkscape * AutoCAD -> FreeCAD * SecureCRT -> PuTTY, Urxvt, etc. * Maya -> Blender * ESXi -> Proxmox * VMWare Player -> VirtualBox Whether they're "credible" depends on the user and their use case. I'm sure there are plenty of things the paid products do better than their open source counterparts, but at the same time, there are likely plenty of users who don't need those features and are perfectly fine with the free alternative. I don't doubt there are more closed source projects than open source, or that there is closed software with zero open source alternatives - just that the claim that open source is a tiny set of all software use cases doesn't seem right. >> It is in nobody’s interest to do any hard work. If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it. > And not nobody. Virtually nobody. Yes open source exists. In 2018, GitHub reported on their blog [0]: > Today we reached a major milestone: 100 million repositories now live on GitHub. Powering this number is an incredible community. Together, you’re 31 million developers from nearly every country and territory in the world, collaborating across 1.1 billion contributions. I think it's safe to say there's more than virtually nobody doing hard work in the open source world and creating gratis software. [0] https://github.blog/2018-11-08-100m-repos/ https://github.blog/2018-11-08-100m-repos/