9 ms·

Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

• q3k 2y ago
  A certain (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
  • bawolff 2y ago
    Indeed, that was my first thought. (Almost) Every mainstream best in class open source product was at one point the kind of crappy open source alternative to an established product.
  • Qwertious 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • gpm 2y ago
      ~45% followed by Windows at ~28% iOS at ~18% and MacOS at ~6% (huge error bars on all those numbers). But really despite having the plurality of the end user market it's real dominance is in the server market.
    • krisoft 2y ago
      Being successful and being “the main anything” is not the same though. Linux as an operating system is very succesfull. Used by all the time on a ton of servers powering a lot of important things. It is also not the main desktop OS. Both of these statements can be, and are, true.
    • Zambyte 2y ago
      It's certainly the main kernel in my house, between the phones, desktops, steam decks, servers, laptops... I'd put the market share at about 95% or so. If you mean globally, not sure. It doesn't affect me
  • RachelF 2y ago
    Don't forget BSD - all Apple operating systems are based on it.
    • bawolff 2y ago
      Arguably they aren't the "alternative" so much as a variant of the original thing that got open sourced.
    • adastra22 2y ago
      BSD stands for Berkeley Software* Distribution (of UNIX). It is a direct descent of UNIX itself, not an open source clone.
      • fanf2 2y ago
        Software, not standard
        • adastra22 2y ago
          Thank you.
  • ThrowawayR2 2y ago
    The original poster is asking about open source alternative SaaSes and Linux/BSD, gcc, Blender, Firefox, etc. is not a SaaS.
• ZunarJ5 2y ago
  Blender.
  • icholy 2y ago
    Blender didn't start as open source.
    • cadr 2y ago
      True, but it's been open source now a lot longer than it was closed source.
      • viccis 2y ago
        I would also say that it was never even close to reasonable competition to commercial alternatives until it open sourced, and it was a while after that before it started to catch up. I still remember some of the artists at Gearbox laughing when I brought Blender up in the late 2000s when I was a teenager touring the studio.
    • owenpalmer 2y ago
      Don't really see why this is relevant. Blender was open sourced over 20 years ago
  • owenpalmer 2y ago
    Blender is absolutely goated
• josephcsible 2y ago
  Do you mean succeeded as in "has a large user base" or as in "makes a lot of money"?
  • barrrrald 2y ago
    Either! Basically any measure an objective observer could look at and be like, "oh yes this is a breakout hit with a bright future ahead of it"
  • jvanderbot 2y ago
    If it's easy to answer one or the other, perhaps let's start with that one.
• tommoor 2y ago
  GitLab, Mattermost, RocketChat would be a few good examples of products that began as OSS alternatives to well-established players. Outline (https://www.getoutline.com https://www.getoutline.com) is successful on most metrics you'd judge a business and OSS project on. I'm not sure if any of these ever pitched themselves explicitly that way on HN though. I think explicitly labeling as an "Open source alternative" brings a lot of baggage and expectations, and often says more about the maintainers philosophical POV than ability to create a sustainable business ;)
  • barrrrald 2y ago
    GitLab is a really interesting example, but I don't know if it'd have positioned itself as an "open source alternative" As for Mattermost, RocketChat, and Outline – I think these are great examples of projects positioned this way that haven't broken out. They all seem great, but it's not clear that being an "open source alternative" to Slack really worked for Mattermost...
    • willsmith72 2y ago
      i know of some gigantic companies using self-hosted mattermost for data privacy reasons. perhaps they have less marketing incentive, but i would certainly call that a success
    • tommoor 2y ago
      > I don't know if it'd have positioned itself as an "open source alternative" It was literally a pixel for pixel open source clone of GitHub for the first few years.
  • ThrowawayR2 2y ago
    GitLab is open core, not open source. They're very clear about that: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2016/07/20/gitlab-is-open-core-github-is-closed-source/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2016/07/20/gitlab-is-open-core...
    • tommoor 2y ago
• brtv 2y ago
  Nextcloud and Bitwarden come to mind.
• hugolundin 2y ago
  KiCad.
  • pointhi 2y ago
    In the hobby market, KiCad is already really big with >40% market share in some fabs: https://aisler.social/@aislerhq/111806804691963640 https://aisler.social/@aislerhq/111806804691963640 And the latest moves from Altium will promote growth in the professional market.
  • the__alchemist 2y ago
    I came here to post this. It's improved much in the past few years. I never feel like I need to pay for Altium etc, or that my designs are limited by the software. I have some gripes, but they're not dealbreakers!
• jjmarr 2y ago
  gcc comes to mind. Remember when every computer came with its own C compiler? LaTeX also killed proprietary mathematics typesetting.
  • drewmcarthur 2y ago
    this is what i’m thinking. HTTP itself only overtook Gopher when it was released into the public domain, to compete with Gopher’s proprietary licensing.
  • jhbadger 2y ago
    GCC's gotten so popular that some operating systems like MacOS lie about it and make "gcc" an alias by default for their clang compiler!
• tsunagatta 2y ago
  OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) has largely become the standard over its (usually proprietary) competition.
• worik 2y ago
  Audacity
• gpm 2y ago
  Examples I haven't seen mentioned yet: Firefox. Atom/VSCode (Sublime Text clones). Android (iOS clone). Various databases (postgres, mongodb, etc). Reddit (Digg alternative, since closed source) though I'm not sure releasing their source code had anything to do with their success. HashiCorp in general sort of counts though it's harder to say "it was competing against X".
  • mellow-lake-day 2y ago
    Atom development has ceased, does that count as successful?
    • mihaaly 2y ago
      All will cease at some point but we shouldn't wait too long just to be pragmatic judging success.
    • gpm 2y ago
      Yes. You don't have to continue to exist forever to be successful, to suggest otherwise would be to amongst other things suggest that no human ever succeeds. Atom development didn't cease because it failed as a product. It ceased because the company building it was acquired by a company that had already built a (open source) clone to compete with it.
    • setopt 2y ago
      Atom is actually alive and well as a community project under the new name “Pulsar”. https://pulsar-edit.dev/ https://pulsar-edit.dev/
  • chx 2y ago
    Care to elaborate in what ways Firefox counts as successful? Maybe it had a brief period of success (maybe) but that was long ago.
    • gpm 2y ago
      There are many ways to measure success, perhaps the easiest (though not necessarily the best) is money. Mozilla currently has net assets of >$1billion almost entirely earned off of it's back. It was without a doubt been a wildly successful product for the non-profit and to suggest otherwise is ludicrous. Likewise it continues to earn >$0.5billion/year revenue for that non-profit, to suggest that it doesn't continue to be a wildly successful product is ludicrous. Could it have done even better for itself? Sure. Being the best possible version of yourself isn't necessary to have been successful though.
• arnejenssen 2y ago
  strapi (CMS)
• tolleydbg 2y ago
  Both WireGuard and OpenVPN
  • BrandoElFollito 2y ago
    Wireguard had no user management (or rather, some kind of identity you can cancel). This is not useable in an entreprise environment without some kind of complicated backend. Something like tailwind. I live WG though, a magical product. Same for openVPN, though there are some extending that help. Compare this with a commercial VPN that will directly plug into your identity system.
    • commercialnix 2y ago
      Wireguard layer-3 tunneling identity (public key) is for machines, not human users. Rolling out Wireguard in an "enterprise environment" for over 600 user laptops and desktops (mix of Linux and some macOS* and Windows*) with our existing configuration management (SaltStack/GitOps) was extremely easy to do. Where additional layer-3 tunnels that were user or group specific were necessary, we did some very light scripting that any sophomore-level Sys Admin can handle. We already have BeyondCorp / ZeroTrust for any layer-4 and above authentication. >> Compare this with a commercial VPN that will directly plug into your identity system. This would be something out of the clicky-clicky industrial complex.
      • BrandoElFollito 2y ago
        Thanks for the feedback. How did you manage the IP assignment, keys revocation, ...? How did your ZT environment worked with WG on the network level? (zScaler creates its own tunnels for instance)
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
• dublinben 2y ago
  cURL is ubiquitous. It's unclear whether there is even a proprietary alternative still being sold commercially.
  • jimbokun 2y ago
    Postman seems like the main proprietary competitor for the same use cases.
    • piyuv 2y ago
      Isn’t it just a curl gui, using curl under the hood ?
• entrepy123 2y ago
  DokuWiki. This database-free FOSS wiki engine [1] with a focus on simplicity is 19 years old, still gets updated, has useful plugins [2] for additional features, is a great choice for many uses, has adopters that use and love it, and has an estimated 50,000-250,000 installations [3]. As someone wrote, "DokuWiki is and will remain king for many simple reasons" [4]. [1] https://www.dokuwiki.org [2] https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugins [3] https://www.dokuwiki.org/faq:installcount [4] https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/145l121/what_wiki_do_you_recommend/jnmd2t7/
  • MitPitt 2y ago
    How does it compare to MediaWiki, another very old and very extensive engine?
    • entrepy123 2y ago
      They are just different animals. Compared to MediaWiki, DokuWiki is "simpler" all around and more lightweight. Simpler in visual design, simpler in how data is stored, simpler in most regards. But in practical use, they are actually pretty close in many ways. DokuWiki is almost like a thoughtfully pared-down (from the start) MediaWiki-like wiki system. DokuWiki still sticks pretty closely to normative wiki conventions about how a wiki "should" (is expected to) work (a la MediaWiki or maybe even as far back as WikiWikiWeb). Visit a non-existing address allows to create a new page; pages use some succinct syntax (which maybe can be replaced for Markdown using some plugin); pages look just fine on web or mobile; etc. Also, the stored data of MediaWiki is arguably more immediately portable (and perhaps more immediately accessible just after a disaster, so long as there was a backup), since it is just a hierarchy of text files. There is no database to administrate in DokuWiki. Granted, MediaWiki is a de facto standard. But this does not make it the only sane choice. If you spin up and make some content in 2 or 3 different wikis, you will see that they have different strengths and weaknesses. There are a lot of interesting and great wiki systems. MediaWiki and DokuWiki are among the greats. There are obviously others, too, and people love different ones, which is wonderful. The more the better. Some a fair-ish comparisons seem to be at https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/dokuwiki+mediawiki https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/dokuwiki+mediawiki and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software
• tomarr 2y ago
  Wordpress is quite a big one? I think Blogger was the main alternative back then, but there were probably several commercial ones with reasonable market share.
• Denvercoder9 2y ago
  Home Assistant.
  • atmanactive 2y ago
    And then some!
• janice1999 2y ago
  Apache, Nginx, Caddy.
• riedel 2y ago
  Supabase https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901
• sevenstar 2y ago
  [dead]
• ccouzens 2y ago
  Wikipedia - I remember when Encarta was how you used an encyclopaedia on your computer.
• rishikeshs 2y ago
  Goatcounter
• wetpaws 2y ago
  Krita
• sebastiansm 2y ago
  R or the Python Scientific stack over SAS or SPSS.
  • jimbokun 2y ago
    Or MATLAB.
    • sebastiansm 2y ago
      I was going to write that software too, but still think that Matlab is so much superior, or maybe is the nostalgia from university years.
      • gandalfgreybeer 2y ago
        Having worked with both Python and matlab in both academic and professional settings, I don't think there's any project where I would pick matlab first unless my hand is forced
    • jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
      I think GNU Octave is the free software MATLAB alternative. Since it aims to be highly compatible and run the same code. Various python stacks do more things, and do them differently.
    • MH15 2y ago
      MATLAB is not open source, or even free.
• oneplane 2y ago
  Pretty much anything on the CNCF landscape. Tradeoffs are generally the same as always: trading control and effort for time and money. If you cannot make that tradeoff (i.e. because you cannot handle the control and effort or because you don't have the time or money) the choice is made for you. Of course there can be a USP and quality aspect, take basic resource metrics for example, you can pay someone to do that for you, or you can do it yourself, the difference in effort is marginal but the difference in cost can be extreme. But there are cases where that marginal difference in effort is what tips the choice towards paying someone else to do it. In my experience, if you cannot make such efforts, or don't have a plan to make such efforts in the future, you're either in the wrong business or are doomed to fail purely on PnL.
• SinePost 2y ago
  I'll narrow the scope to "OSS software that is common and where its license is not a selling point to most of its users." KHTML/Chromium/WebKit (to Internet Explorer), Firefox, MySQL, BSD (to AT&T Unix), GCC, LLVM, GIMP, InkScape, VLC to name a few.
• codegeek 2y ago
  I like Bitwarden [0]. Backend in .NET. [0] https://github.com/bitwarden/server https://github.com/bitwarden/server
  • Kikawala 2y ago
    Vaultwarden [0]. Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust [0] https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
  • n8henrie 2y ago
    Came to make sure Bitwarden had been mentioned. Have spend years on LastPass and 1password, now pretty darn satisfied with a couple years on Bitwarden.
• anjiro 2y ago
  Canvas is an open-source learning management system used at universities: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms
  • wizerno 2y ago
    Surprising! This feels exactly like finding out Overleaf is open-source a few days back [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40832930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40832930
• glutamate 2y ago
  It looks like baserow (open source alternative to AirTable) is making a fair amount of income.
• alganet 2y ago
  A "SaaS app" is something rather new. In the old times (early 2000s), you would buy some proprietary server code and get a consultant to install/maintain it for you. I think vBulletin still operates on this model, although they now offer it as a service too. phpBB is the oldest alternative to vBulletin, there are plenty. Eventually all these CMSs from the 2000s were cloned and freed in some way or another. Our "SaaS" was cpanel which automagically installed these (they were THIS close to "serverless", if they only knew). By 2010, people barely knew what MovableType was. cpanel is gone, shared hosting is gone, but that cloned freed CMS tech evolved and still powers a large chunk of the web. Why doesn't it happen now? I don't know. Maybe it takes time, maybe that was a lucky decade, maybe it's happening in some place I'm not looking at.
  • thecrash 2y ago
    It's because the SaaS offerings are free and good quality. Reddit, Slack, Medium, Etsy, etc are better experiences than self hosting for most use cases. This isn't permanent, though - these services are getting enshittified and the FOSS alternatives are gradually improving. I think you're right that it takes time and a tipping point will eventually be reached just as it was in the 2010s.
• haunter 2y ago
  Early days torrent scene ran on proprietary adware clients like BitTorrent itself, µTorrent, and BitComet but nowadays open source clients are more popular and recommended by most trackers. I'm on a pretty big private tracker and almost everyone (+95%) is using qBittorrent, Transmission, or rTorrent. Though Vuze was also one of the earliest clients and it's also open source for some reasons it never really became popular. Maybe because it's a Java client?
  • rsayers 2y ago
    I used Vuze for a bit back in the day, it was a resource hog on whatever I was running it on. I think I mostly stuck with uTorrent until switching to the open source alternatives. I actually use all three you mentioned in different contexts.
  • poikroequ 2y ago
    While it's been known as Vuze for a long time now, it was originally known as Azureus. It was pretty popular at one point. Then uTorrent came out which was super lightweight in comparison, so it quickly gained popularity... at least before it became riddled with adware. Java clients were typically very bloated on older PCs, and Vuze was no exception.
    • ilt 2y ago
      Wasn't Azuerus the one with 3d views of seeds and peers? It was crazy to see that in a torrent client at the time.. I remember it getting very bloated and rebranded to Vuze before I left it for other smaller and faster clients
  • hnthr_w_y 2y ago
    > Though Vuze was also one of the earliest clients and it's also open source for some reasons it never really became popular. Maybe because it's a Java client? Funny story there. Vuze had an addon/plugin system of sorts. Rather popular addons were the ones that allowed you to 'fake upload'. Vuze didn't have this built-in or anything, but it just made it easier. For that reason basically any and every version was banned from the reputable trackers of the day, private, obviously. For the users of public trackers, this is obviously irrelevant but that basically killed it right there and then, in time.
• fgeiger 2y ago
  Odoo (formerly OpenERP) is a successful open source ERP.
• JSDevOps 2y ago
  Asterisk
• simantel 2y ago
  GitLab is definitely the most obvious success at $600M+ in revenue, but a couple new ones are Cal.com and PostHog. Cal.com is open-source Calendly, has raised $32M, and shares their stats publicly: https://cal.com/open https://cal.com/open PostHog is open-source Mixpanel/Amplitude, has raised $39M, and appears to be widely recommended these days.
  • rafark 2y ago
    What about git? Wasn’t git developed exactly as an alternative to a commercial product? Git is probably the most successful open source alternative software, so much that it completely obliterated the competition.
    • shiroiushi 2y ago
      Yes, Linus Torvalds developed git because the Linux kernel at the time used Bitkeeper, a proprietary source control system and its owner was changing the license. Now, everyone and their goldfish uses git, and I haven't heard about Bitkeeper in many years. It hasn't completely obliterated all the competition, but most of it, and those that aren't dead are on life support: in the open-source domain, CVS is mostly dead, SVN isn't far behind, and Mercurial is barely hanging on. In the proprietary domain, it seems only stodgy long-time enterprise customers still use Perforce and ClearCase, and MS's SourceSafe seems to be dead (and MS even bought GitHub).
      • chuckadams 2y ago
        Linus didn’t write git because the BitKeeper license had changed exactly, he did it because Larry McVoy yanked Linux off the platform after Andrew Tridgell (of Samba and rsync fame) started poking around at the protocol to reverse engineer it. It turned out BK was so buggy that that alone was enough to corrupt other repos on the server, so McVoy just went and disabled Linux’s access without warning. Linus was pretty steamed at the participants in that debacle (especially Tridge for some reason) and named his replacement for what he thought of them. Now you know.
• yen223 2y ago
  Javascript is a funny one. Javascript being an open standard meant there were no barriers to re-implementing them on alternative browsers. So when Internet Explorer started to lose its throne to Chrome and Firefox, Javascript survived while VBScript did not. When Apple decided to introduce webkit but not Flash to iOS, Javascript survived while Flash did not.
• listenallyall 2y ago
  R language was created as an open-source clone of a proprietary language, S.
• mcnrb12 2y ago
  llama3 seems quite popular. not exactly a business by itself, but def a strategic play by meta.
• Yawrehto 2y ago
  Wait, has no one mentioned LibreOffice yet? 200 million active users (!) seems like it's successful enough. Admittedly, it hasn't really challenged Microsoft Office yet, but it's growing, and also it's hard to look at something with 200 million active users and say 'that's a failure'. Definitely an alternative though. There's also uBlock Origin, but I don't know if it's the largest adblocker yet. It should be, though. I think it is a serious competitor, even in terms of market share, to many major for-profit adblockers.
  • garashovb 2y ago
    Came for LibreOffice, saw that mentioned already.
  • fwn 2y ago
    > uBlock Origin I think the market share of ublock Origin helped limit the success of so-called "acceptable ads" schemes, where adblock makers took money for excluding certain ad providers. But I don't have any data to back that up either.
    • r3db34rd 2y ago
      [flagged]
  • _aavaa_ 2y ago
    Opening LibreCalc just once was enough to prove to me that it's not a viable alternative to Office. Both usability and performance were bad, performance egregiously so.
    • Yawrehto 2y ago
      I don't know, I don't use spreadsheets a ton, but for my fairly casual usage Calc is good. I use Writer a lot, and it's great. When my largest complaint is "it doesn't have a font I like pre-installed", that says something about its quality.
    • legacynl 2y ago
• mrcsharp 2y ago
  With how anti-consumer the recent Plex moves have been, Jellyfin [1] has gotten really popular among self-hosting community. It is arguably the best alternative to Plex in terms of features and the amount of freedom given to the user. [1] https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin
  • ray_v 2y ago
    Plex really does have a lot going for it with the really nice Apps -- Plexamp works especially well with large music libraries. I hadn't used Jellyfin in some time, but I went to set it up last week, and it's still not as simple as Plex is. Really wish the Jellyfin folks would put together a docker compose setup that run nginx and lets encrypt for example.
    • mrcsharp 2y ago
      Jellyfin has its own apps plus a few other community-built ones like finamp[1] and findroid[2] which I personally use a lot. I would argue that setting up nginx or other reverse proxy servers is outside the scope of Jellyfin. That is an infrastructure concern that is usually going to be very unique to your setup. I, for example, use Traefik as my reverse proxy which requires a different set of configurations to get it working with Jellyfin. I don't expect the Jellyfin team to provide a guide for every reverse proxy. It would be nice, but I can see how this is out of their scope. [1] https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp [2] https://github.com/jarnedemeulemeester/findroid https://github.com/jarnedemeulemeester/findroid
      • ray_v 2y ago
        That's a fair point -- a reverse proxy setup may be outside the scope of the jellyfin project, but as others have pointed out they also provide an official docker image with a docker compose and other container management solutions. It just seems like a logical next step would be to outline instructions for a more secure setup using something "standard" like nginx instead of leaving it as an exercise to the user -- who may not be so tech savvy.
• xspiral 2y ago
  [dead]
• constantinum 2y ago
  For photo editing and manipulation 1) https://www.gimp.org/ https://www.gimp.org/ 2) https://www.digikam.org/ https://www.digikam.org/ 3) https://www.darktable.org/ https://www.darktable.org/ Vector based editing tool 1) https://inkscape.org/ https://inkscape.org/ Desktop publishing https://www.scribus.net/ https://www.scribus.net/
  • coffeebeqn 2y ago
    Fairly well known on HN by now but Krita is also excellent lightweight and simple image editor and painting app like Photoshop was 20 years ago https://krita.org/en/ https://krita.org/en/
• memset 2y ago
  Minio - open source S3
• riazmuns19 2y ago
  OBS Studio - I found this to be a very valuable and successful application for video and audio editing, with some amazing companies sponsoring them. - https://obsproject.com/ https://obsproject.com/
  • saghm 2y ago
    I first heard of OBS from Twitch streamers talking about using it years ago, and I was taken back when finding out later that it's open source and works well on Linux. I had mistakenly assumed it must be gaming-specific Windows thing because it didn't even occur to me that it could end up being so widely used by that demographic otherwise.
• ensocode 2y ago
  Thunderbird
• mid-kid 2y ago
  I think Blender applies - it's risen from the ashes and is used in commercial productions a lot in recent memory.
• throwaway2046 2y ago
  VLC comes to mind. It's been years since I last saw anyone using any other media player.
  • opan 2y ago
    mpv is a pretty major competitor (recommended especially in enthusiast communities), but is also free software.
  • hulitu 2y ago
    Mplayer ?
• toofy 2y ago
  So much, I know a lot of these have already been said so forgive me if I repeat some that others have said, - 80-90% of the web's servers (something like nginx 35%, Apache 30%, cloudflare 20% who I believe run Linux for a large chunk of their infrastructure, litespeed 10%) - stock market. I've read a number of articles discussing how NYSE, Tokyo, and NASDAQ run their trades and servers on Linux. - internet infrastructure: From Linux to ssl to VPN sooooo much of internet's infrastructure is open source. From the servers to the protocols to the stacks. I don't have hard numbers but I'd be comfortable guessing at least 3/4 of the net's infra is open source. - Git - Firefox - Wikipedia - Home Assistant - OBS - Linux - VLC - DaVinci Resolve is rising soooo fast for video editing, and for good reason. Once you move out of the consumer/hobbyist tier or beyond Premiere and more into pro-tier hardware Resolve is fucking incredible. It will be a couple of years before it displaces Avid's strangle hold on the film industry, but it's going to happen. - Blender encoders, while you may not notice it, a ton of the media we consume is coded with open source, from: - AV1 of Netflix/Amazon/Youtube fame - VP9 - x264 - x265 - Apple Lossless, etc... - ffmpeg - Android is built off AOSP. - Wordpress And obviously I'm missing thousands of used-in-production very "succesful" projects.
  • pen2l 2y ago
    DaVinci Resolve is great (I'm partial to all Adobe replacements; Resolve is indeed a great alternative to Premiere, and Pixelmator, Rebelle, Affinity, etc. are great replacements for Photoshop), but none of these are OSS.
• ogou 2y ago
  Inkscape, Audacity, and ffmpeg. I know professional designers don't like Inkscape for UI and path limitations but I have gotten used to it and can use it effectively.
• masteruvpuppetz 2y ago
  Blender, ffmpeg, pdf24
  • achrono 2y ago
    pdf24 does not appear to be open-source, just free (as in beer). Were you thinking of PDFtk?
• shortrounddev2 2y ago
  Blender
• tomwheeler 2y ago
  I suppose I'm stretching the definition of SaaS here, but I'm going to say SSH (both client and daemon). It was originally released as freeware, but after it was widely adopted in the mid 1990s, its creator made it proprietary and created a company called SSH Communications Security to sell it. After a series of security vulnerabilities in that commercial software, OpenBSD developers got fed up and created OpenSSH, and basically everyone migrated to that within a year.
• petabyt 2y ago
  GCC, clang, Rust, most compilers these days. Nobody really uses a closed-source compiler now unless you are stuck with Microsoft.
• commercialnix 2y ago
  Reports from large bodies of users is they are very happy with https://OnlyOffice.com https://OnlyOffice.com which some clients are on to avoid GSuite to avoid sharing their business data with a faceless and highly ideologically partisan third party (Google). Thus far the only cases where the MS Office users don't gradually slide into the gravity of an OnlyOffice service on private silicon is the heavy MS Excel (desktop) users who are of a very relevant (CFO, accounting) yet relatively small cohort.
• commercialnix 2y ago
  We should also note, that all modern SaaS is running on mostly open source databases, open source languages, open source middleware, and the PaaS and IaaS they are running on are all powered by open source too. This is not to disregard the meaningful thought and work that goes into the proprietary layers built on top of the open source codebases. But, we should all acknowledge that without those extremely high quality open source codebases, most SaaS wouldn't exist in the first place.
• dredmorbius 2y ago
  I could list out a bunch of examples (and deleted my first draft of this comment listing various examples: Wikipedia, operating systems, Web browsers, software languages, databases, and a host of desktop and mobile apps generally). But I think the more interesting perspective is to reverse the question: where are proprietary software specifically successful? Many years ago I'd noted that the concept of a shrinkwrap-based software company had very few successful exemplars. Microsoft and, perhaps Adobe, being the best-known cases. Through the mid-aughts, most other "software" firms had tremendous consulting arms: IBM, Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP, Symantec, Informix, and the Big-N consulting companies notably. Since the mid-aughts, SAAS and social media companies have arisen, though that's still a segment where a very small number of companies come to claim a monopoly position, largely due to adtech dynamics (on both ad sales aggregation and surveillance data). Actual shrinkwrap software markets are increasingly marginal, fighting for table scraps, with the remaining large participants (Microsoft, Adobe) increasingly headed to subscription and/or ad-supported business models.
• beryilma 2y ago
  Kicad for electronic circuit design. Freecad for CAD and solid design.
• andrei-akopian 2y ago
  Good question, and I don't like the answers of other users. They are exclusively naming big well estabilished applications, that could be there due to pure luck. Though it is true that LibreOffice, ffmpeg, and Linux are successful and widely used, I was much more curious whether the small ShowHN ones got anywhere. And I barely found any. All (recent) FOSS success stories come from the proprietary apps being so screwed up. (At least that's my impression)
• DonsDiscountGas 2y ago
  To be fair, the vast majority of new businesses and projects fail, OSS or not.
• Oksitaine 2y ago
  Insomnia, open-source alternative to Postman for example make HTTP Request like the extension Thunder in VSCode. I use Insomnia every day.
• nylonstrung 2y ago
  Godot is inflecting fast as an alternative to Unity and has produced some hits on Steam such as Balatro and Cruelty Squad