Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?
It seems like every day there's a Show HN post for another "open source alternative" to a popular SaaS app.
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.
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.
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.
I have the complete opposite experience. I use CSV files a lot, LibreCalc has a sane import dialog and handles these files near perfect by default. When working with Excel-users I always get a reply along the lines of „the file is weird, can you send me xls?“
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…
Excel used to give you the option of using the import wizard for CSVs when you opened them. Now they've intentionally hidden that in a submenu, for some bizarre reason.
Libre Office is good enough for basic use, but Excel has a lot of great features for intermediate users. Some of the newer functions they've added in the last few years are great, I use LET with my own lambdas and the quite often. I also kinda like the Power Query/M language, but the implementation in Excel is absolutely horrible.
this sound really spoiled. I think if your first experience with this kind of software is librecalc you'd be perfectly fine with it.
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.
> this sound really spoiled.
Spoiled in that I can afford to pay for office when I need it for a moneymaking business, sure I guess. But it is not being spoiled to judge an alternative by the same metrics as the incumbent, if it doesn't meet my requirements it doesn't matter whether it's paid or free.
> Expectations are very important for perceived usability,
I grant you that the UI is laid out differently and things are done in a different matter, which isn't intrinsically worse. But in this case I argue that it is.
For example, I have a set of x-y coordinates that I want to plot. I accidentally do not select all of them when creating the chart. Where do I now go in order to extend the selection?? Where do I go if I forgot to add the column headings to the selection? New users can certainly learn these things with enough head bashings, but it can certainly be more accessible.
Why does the UI seeming keep disabling my trackpad scrolling as I focus on chart elements versus the sheet as a whole? Why does it come to a glacial crawl when working with more than a few dozen points? Where is the option to disable snap-to-column/row when panning?
> perfectly usable
High praise. Though I agree with you. If you have different requirements, especially less of them, then I'm sure that you can do manage just fine without excel.
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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.
I had the same experience too, probably around the same time as you!
(namely a decade ago)
Things change.
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For people who need to use Office seriously, unfortunately LibreOffice is not an option. But should be good for light usage.
> 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.
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Came for LibreOffice, saw that mentioned already.
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?
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.
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
> 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.
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.
I used Azureus, before it was renamed Vuze, in early 2003. All my friends had Azureus too, maybe because Macintoshes were what most of our parents (and thus we) had at the time. Azureus was what we all knew.
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/
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.
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
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.
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 [2] https://github.com/jarnedemeulemeester/findroid
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.
> 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.
Maybe this is what you're looking for:
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/networking/
Edit: On desktop, the sidebar is visible which includes links to instructions for Nginx, Caddy, Let's Encrypt, and some other things. I didn't realize at first because I looked at it on the desktop, but on mobile it seems you'll need to hit the hamburger menu to get to those links.
Oh this is very nice! I don't think they had these docs when I first set up Jellyfin years ago.
nice! I can't remember now if i used these docs -- i feel like i sort of fumbled through a solution though lol
> Really wish the Jellyfin folks would put together a docker compose setup that run nginx and lets encrypt for example.
I don't know what they include but there are official docker images.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/container
Look up a container called SWAG, it has an nginx template for jellyfin and lots of other services.
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.
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.
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
PostHog is open-source Mixpanel/Amplitude, has raised $39M, and appears to be widely recommended these days.
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.
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).
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.
> Linus was pretty steamed at the participants in that debacle (especially Tridge for some reason)
The reason was that Tridge was trying to build an OSS alternative to BK.
Not that that made Tridge in any way deserving of Linus's ire ... but I guess Linus was upset to see his personal friend McVoy go off like this, and blamed who they saw as the instigator. Not the best reaction all told, but understandable human behavior regardless. Of course, the actually meaningful response was that he wrote Git, so it's all just ancient history now. I doubt there's any hard feelings left between any of the parties, or at least I like to think so.
You'd like to think so, but I wonder what McVoy thinks about it all. After all, before that, he had Bitkeeper which was his business, which had the distinction and fame of being used for the Linux kernel project. Now, who even remembers BK?
Codeberg is a nice upcoming one aswell!
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].
How does it compare to MediaWiki, another very old and very extensive engine?
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 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software
* Obvious typo: "data of DokuWiki is arguably more immediately portable... There is no database to administrate in DokuWiki." should replace "data of MediaWiki is arguably more immediately portable...There is no database to administrate in DokuWiki."
OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) has largely become the standard over its (usually proprietary) competition.
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.
gcc comes to mind. Remember when every computer came with its own C compiler? LaTeX also killed proprietary mathematics typesetting.
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!
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.
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".
I wouldn’t call Atom/VSCode “clones” of Sublime Text. They were clearly inspired, but are missing the minimalist interface and high performance that for me are key features of Sublime Text.
In this sense, I consider Zed to be more of in the Sublime Text genre than VSCode or Atom was.
Firefox is open sourced Netscape Navigator 5.0.
No, it's not. We tossed that code 6 months after the open sourcing and started fresh to build the Communicator clone which we then tossed aside for the entirely new Firefox. Firefox is not Navigator 5. That's plain inaccurate.
In the context of this question, I think it's perfectly accurate. Firefox did not start as a grassroots developed open-source project, like Linux did.
Android is not a iOS clone, and open source-ish (Google still decides the roadmap)
Android existed (internally) before iOS, but to quote a google engineer working on it at the time, iOS released and they went "We’re going to have to start over."
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 has ceased, does that count as successful?
All will cease at some point but we shouldn't wait too long just to be pragmatic judging success.
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.
Atom is actually alive and well as a community project under the new name “Pulsar”.
https://pulsar-edit.dev/
Care to elaborate in what ways Firefox counts as successful? Maybe it had a brief period of success (maybe) but that was long 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.
Do you live in a world where success means "#1" and failure means "not #1"?
Before the rise of Chrome, it hovered at 20-30% market share for many years. After the preceding period of IE dominance, I’d call that successful.
Canvas is an open-source learning management system used at universities: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms
Surprising! This feels exactly like finding out Overleaf is open-source a few days back [0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40832930
I think Blender applies - it's risen from the ashes and is used in commercial productions a lot in recent memory.
I like Bitwarden [0]. Backend in .NET.
[0] https://github.com/bitwarden/server
Vaultwarden [0]. Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust
[0] https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
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.
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.
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.
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.
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) 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 ;)
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...
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
> 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.
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...
Ok, cool.
For photo editing and manipulation 1) https://www.gimp.org/
2) https://www.digikam.org/
3) https://www.darktable.org/
Vector based editing tool
1) https://inkscape.org/
Desktop publishing
https://www.scribus.net/
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/
Wikipedia - I remember when Encarta was how you used an encyclopaedia on your computer.
Blender.
Blender didn't start as open source.
True, but it's been open source now a lot longer than it was closed source.
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.
Don't really see why this is relevant. Blender was open sourced over 20 years ago
Blender is absolutely goated
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.
cURL is ubiquitous. It's unclear whether there is even a proprietary alternative still being sold commercially.
Postman seems like the main proprietary competitor for the same use cases.
Isn’t it just a curl gui, using curl under the hood ?
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)
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.
R language was created as an open-source clone of a proprietary language, S.
R or the Python Scientific stack over SAS or SPSS.
Or MATLAB.
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.
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.
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
MATLAB is not open source, or even free.
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.
Reports from large bodies of users is they are very happy with 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.
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.
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.
Insomnia, open-source alternative to Postman for example make HTTP Request like the extension Thunder in VSCode.
I use Insomnia every day.
GCC, clang, Rust, most compilers these days. Nobody really uses a closed-source compiler now unless you are stuck with Microsoft.
Odoo (formerly OpenERP) is a successful open source ERP.
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.
Both WireGuard and OpenVPN
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.
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.
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)
Looks like I forgot to clarify the meaning of the asterisk, so here:
[*] we charge a hefty premium to manage third party OS in a sideways way by offering a 75% discount on our endpoint OS, with exception to special and authentic cases (some 3D CAD or other).
Three important points of context to highlight here:
0.] We don't hire for "butts in seats", we hire for aptitude and/or talent then also culture very carefully and if someone isn't vibing, isn't "getting it", we fire very fast (locking them out with the same stack we use to operate customers' devices).
1.] We don't use Git in the typical pedestrian centralized way (ie GitLab), Git is of a distributed and we use Git as such in an approach that gracefully is combined with other things that, like Git, do their one small thing and do it right. Our approach has been described as "nirvana for security and compliance" and is still considered somewhat novel. We would call this "bespoke", but the use of this approach has been uniform in each place.
2.] We consider our Git approach with SaltStack something that any entry-level SysAdmin or even IT Ops should be able to wrap their head around. Salt obviates a lot of Python we might otherwise write. The end customer has "engineers" who do write in some interpreted languages, maybe some languages on JVM and some C#, but they don't write software in a sane way, so they pay for our clicky clicky to talk to our API for what we have done. Ultimately, the customer doesn't really "do computer" (even though they try), they are users, "power users" at best (which is kind of worse actually). Open Source is about *source code* ie software, which is the part we are good at and the customer is not.
3.] Without the existing wealth of open source software, we would not even attempt to be playing the same ballpark we are now. Context number zero is more strongly why we are much more confident with what we have than anything in the whitelabel-option Managed Services Provider space, but this context number three is also a big part.
The BeyondCorp / ZeroTrust in place does all of its "smart" like time-of-day or some statistic/heuristic at layer-4 (TLS). The layer-3 is there too because defense-in-depth. I know we have something on the roadmap to add more smarts to the Wireguard pieces (I'd have to ask someone). The non-management Wireguard tunnels, the ones for "app", don't come up without TPM unbothered and a user's hardware key being involved. We haven't yet seen a BeyondCorp / ZeroTrust suite from a vendor we found compelling or "we really want X feature they have" that we can't easily (and more quickly than a sales cycle) do ourselves with our model.
Background:
The customer had existing IPAM, but it was too much of a mess. The kinds of customers that don't have clean IPAM also don't have IPv6. So we went ahead and used some of the IPv6 that our corp has from ARIN with proper agreements in place with customer to make using our IPv6 space "okay" and endpoints do 4in6 to reach customers' existing IPv4 subnets (mostly RFC1918).
Every device in our purview is notated as a YAML versioned by Git for SaltStack to do whatever on the device. Each machine has a unique id, similar to the /etc/machine-id concept, with data for that machine expressed as SaltStack Pillar.
Typical incident:
Suppose machine morty.foo.baz.example.net is stolen from a user's car. Upon awareness of the incident the key "status" in the YAML for morty is updated to have value "stolen" added to change management (Git). A look up is done on every public key used by the Wireguard peer named Morty, and every device that uses any of those public keys gets poked to apply the new data expressed as Salt.
Remediation:
On another device running Wireguard named Rick, the public key for Morty is now expressed in a new way by Salt Pillar and the relevant Salt State has "file.absent" for the public key. For the public key Salt already has "onchanges" to "service reload wireguard-something" (reload, not restart) via init script which changes what needs to be changed and only what needs to be changed.
Do you mean succeeded as in "has a large user base" or as in "makes a lot of money"?
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"
If it's easy to answer one or the other, perhaps let's start with that one.
Apache, Nginx, Caddy.
Audacity
KiCad.
In the hobby market, KiCad is already really big with >40% market share in some fabs: https://aisler.social/@aislerhq/111806804691963640
And the latest moves from Altium will promote growth in the professional market.
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!
Godot is inflecting fast as an alternative to Unity and has produced some hits on Steam such as Balatro and Cruelty Squad
Supabase
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901
To be fair, the vast majority of new businesses and projects fail, OSS or not.
VLC comes to mind. It's been years since I last saw anyone using any other media player.
mpv is a pretty major competitor (recommended especially in enthusiast communities), but is also free software.
Mplayer ?
llama3 seems quite popular. not exactly a business by itself, but def a strategic play by meta.
It looks like baserow (open source alternative to AirTable) is making a fair amount of income.
Kicad for electronic circuit design. Freecad for CAD and solid design.
Thunderbird
Nextcloud and Bitwarden come to mind.
Blender, ffmpeg, pdf24
pdf24 does not appear to be open-source, just free (as in beer). Were you thinking of PDFtk?
Minio - open source S3
Blender
Goatcounter
Asterisk
strapi (CMS)
A certain (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
Don't forget BSD - all Apple operating systems are based on it.
Arguably they aren't the "alternative" so much as a variant of the original thing that got open sourced.
BSD stands for Berkeley Software* Distribution (of UNIX). It is a direct descent of UNIX itself, not an open source clone.
Software, not standard
Thank you.
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.
The original poster is asking about open source alternative SaaSes and Linux/BSD, gcc, Blender, Firefox, etc. is not a SaaS.
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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.
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
~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.
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Krita
Home Assistant.
And then some!