And indeed, this search shows 34 pages of results, with clones of everything from Notion to Jira to Hex to Figma to Carta. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=open+source+alternative
I have some personal hypotheses on why this is a common pattern, but I am mostly wondering whether any of these have really succeeded as projects / businesses. Are there any examples of these "open source alternative"-type products really taking off?
This can be taken however you want – either big revenue, or big user base – I'm just looking for some marker of being a breakout hit.
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.
And yes, I know that Excel opens CSV just fine. But it is not straightforward enough to explain it to a semi computer-literate office drone…
Especially because you mention usability. Expectations are very important for perceived usability, but librecalc is a different program so at some level you will have to use it differently. If any of those differences touch on your workflow, you will be biased towards calling it unusable instead of attributing this to just not being used to the software.
Fact of the matter is that LibreOffice allows a user to do office tasks for free. You might have to do it differently, but if you get used to it, it will be perfectly usable.
(namely a decade ago)
Things change.
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.
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?
Java clients were typically very bloated on older PCs, and Vuze was no exception.
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.
I actually use all three you mentioned in different contexts.
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 [2] https://github.com/jarnedemeulemeester/findroid
I don't know what they include but there are official docker images.
- 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.
Cal.com is open-source Calendly, has raised $32M, and shares their stats publicly: https://cal.com/open
PostHog is open-source Mixpanel/Amplitude, has raised $39M, and appears to be widely recommended these days.
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).
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/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 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software
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.
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".
In this sense, I consider Zed to be more of in the Sublime Text genre than VSCode or Atom was.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
> and open source-ish (Google still decides the roadmap)
Open source doesn't mean developed by committee, it means the source is released openly and under a permissive license. That is unquestionably done with android, to the point where competitors have taken that source and made competing phones without Google's involvement.
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.
Could it have done even better for itself? Sure. Being the best possible version of yourself isn't necessary to have been successful though.
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.
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.
I think Blogger was the main alternative back then, but there were probably several commercial ones with reasonable market share.
Outline (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 ;)
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...
It was literally a pixel for pixel open source clone of GitHub for the first few years.
Vector based editing tool
Desktop publishing
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
I use Insomnia every day.
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.
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.
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.
And the latest moves from Altium will promote growth in the professional market.