Ask HN: What software is so good you are surprised it is free? - joshdance
======
Radim
Scikit-learn. The guys have done, and are continuing to do, an amazing job and
the output is completely free. There is some funding involved, but the
ultimate value/cost ratio is ridiculously high.

"How Open Source is Really Maintained" comes to mind: [https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/1280/1*Q_8HbGbbfEmAjwPqB...](https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/1280/1*Q_8HbGbbfEmAjwPqB8D60A.png)

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tmnvix
VLC.

Pretty much my entire development stack.

The programming community in general is bloody amazing. I feel very grateful
to be a part of it.

~~~
nixpulvis
I remember downloading VLC for the first time and being overjoyed with the
ease, reliability and compatibility. Nothing has changed in the years since
then, something most software can't say.

------
nixpulvis
Linux... but I guess I'm not really surprised. Most of what's so good about it
is a result of it being free.

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mintplant
TreeSheets: [http://strlen.com/treesheets/](http://strlen.com/treesheets/) \-
infinitely nestable spreadsheets, great for organizers

TreeProjects Personal Database:
[http://personaldatabase.org/](http://personaldatabase.org/) \- searchable,
inter-linkable, hierarchical notes and media tracking for projects

Godot Game Engine: [https://godotengine.org/](https://godotengine.org/) \- the
scene graph system wherein a "scene" is just a saved subtree of nodes and can
be instantiated at any point within a parent scene is so far beyond the clumsy
scene/prefab split in eg. Unity

~~~
Kraftwurm
Thanks! Very interesting software.

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brettkromkamp
Blender. It is probably one of the most versatile 3D suites available.

~~~
glandium
Interestingly, Blender was originally proprietary, and was open-sourced after
its parent company went bankrupt, and only after money was raised from the
open-source crowd (before crowdfunding was a thing).

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sgillen
Also all of python (absolutely beautiful language) and the associated eco
system. I’m thinking mostly of numpy/scipy/matplot lib etc, but there are so
many more.

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taeric
It was said in jest, but emacs really is amazingly good for what it costs.
Even more so if I consider each of the individual contributions that I take
advantage of from so many other contributors. Helm, org-mode, use-package,
paredit-everywhere, ace-isearch, magit, undo-tree, ...

The list really is quite impressive. And then there are the things I don't
use, but still impress the hell out of me. Skewer mode being the frontrunner
there.

Then there is Firefox. Easy to complain about memory usage and whatnot, but it
really is an impressive piece of engineering for what I paid for it.

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joshdance
For me Handbrake is very impressive. When I was ripping DVDs frequently it
worked great, and the queue feature is super.

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qalmakka
KDE Plasma for me, it's amazing how good it is and how stable it has become.
I've been using KDE for years and I've recommended it to almost anyone I could
- and they always stuck with it, because it was simply too much well done.
Compared to gnome 3 and other new desktop environments, KDE has always been so
easy to use, predictable and customisable, a very joy to use.

~~~
mnm1
Which kde distro would you recommend for stability?

~~~
emilsedgh
I'm personally on Debian. Some times it lags behind a couple of releases but
I'm happy with it as it's very stable.

Some people are extremely happy with KDE Neron though.

The core stays on the latest Ubuntu LTS but the KDE is updates real quick to
the latest version.

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jakebasile
Well there's Vim. OBS[1] is pretty rad, too.

If we're including programming languages under "software": Clojure.

If we're including libraries under "Software": Lacinia[2] and Reagent[3].

If we're including databases: ArangoDB[4].

1: [https://obsproject.com/](https://obsproject.com/)

2:
[https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia](https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia)

3: [https://holmsand.github.io/reagent/](https://holmsand.github.io/reagent/)

4: [https://www.arangodb.com/](https://www.arangodb.com/)

------
csharpminor
Metabase: [https://www.metabase.com](https://www.metabase.com)

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eitland
Visual Studio Code

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sgillen
OpenCV? Basically the de facto standard in computer vision.

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sametmax
Postgres and redis.

~~~
lessclue
No piece of software has surprised me like Redis has. The sheer elegance,
performance, and reliability is mind boggling. Long live antirez!

~~~
sametmax
Have you tried to compile it ? This is the easiest compilation experience I
had in my life. Hell, sometime I just compile it for sheer pleasure.

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interfixus
Any number of programming languages and their implementations. My personal
favorites being Nim, Lua, and the sadly forgotten Tcl/Tk.

Linux. Arch for my fancy stuff, Alpine for my servers.

SQLite and Fossil, from the inimitable D. Richard Hipp, plus rsync and rclone
to keep everything in its place.

Yes, I'm a minimalist.

Of course, _good_ is so intrinsically tied up with _free_ that we cannot pry
them apart. Not for the sake of money (I do contribute, I do donate), but for
the convenience and accessability, and of course the principle.

Oh, and GIMP. How could I forget?

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Mononokay
Krita. It has the best brush engine by farrrrrrrrrrr. You generally have to
use custom brushes though, the default ones are mediocre at best.

~~~
slazaro
How would you compare it to Photoshop and what would you say to a Photoshop
digital painter to get them to switch to Krita (or at least try it out for a
while)?

~~~
Mononokay
The Good in Comparison:

It's incredibly faster.

It does a spectacular job at emulating how real painting feels.

The color picker is a lot better in Krita, in my opinion.

Krita can use (some) Photoshop brushes out of the box, just add them in.

It has an (arguably) better interface, and four color schemes out of the box.

The Bad in Comparison:

It doesn't have the non-painting effects of Photoshop, which can be a huge
downside if you tend to use those on your projects.

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japaget
Zim Desktop Wiki ([http://zim-wiki.org/](http://zim-wiki.org/)). It is great
note taking application that supports Rich Text features such as bold, italic,
checkbox and bullet lists. It also supports Greek letters, subscripts,
superscripts, and Unicode, making it very useful for entering mathematical
equations.

------
zachrose
OpenSCAD. It’s not feature rich but it does its thing very well with a clean
user interface AND a nice language to work in.

------
ioddly
Podcast Addict. I paid like $1.99 to remove the ads from it, I feel super
guilty that I can't somehow give more.

~~~
pourty
Agree, this is an awesome app. You can give the dev more BTW - they have
PayPal and other ways you can give them more money. Send them an email

------
scarface74
I'm still in awe that no matter what coding stack you use, you can almost
always do everything you need without paying a dime.

With Microsoft, even Visual Studio Team Services is free - private Git hosting
for up to five users, a decent CI/CD orchestration platform, a private Nuget
feed, project planning, etc.

------
oxplot
Metabase. [https://metabase.com/](https://metabase.com/)

------
KerrickStaley
Signal ([https://signal.org/](https://signal.org/))

------
gotrecruit
not sure if this counts, but as long as you have a .edu account, all of
JetBrains stuff is technically free. i've been using all their IDEs since
school, and continue to renew my licenses with my .edu email no issues.

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jakoblorz
Well obviously not free but waaay to cheap: sublime For free: visual studio
code

~~~
arthurcolle
sublime is overpriced by a factor of 2-3

especially with competition from atom + with electron improvements leading to
atom not having totally garbage performance

------
mindcrash
I'm working on some BYOH cloud based data processing lately soooo....:

\- Everything sponsored by the CNCF
([https://www.cncf.io/](https://www.cncf.io/))

\- Everything Hashicorp
([https://www.hashicorp.com/](https://www.hashicorp.com/))

\- OpenStack ([https://www.openstack.org/](https://www.openstack.org/))

And a small bonus:

\- Dotmesh ([https://dotmesh.com/](https://dotmesh.com/)), snapshot
awesomeness

------
Jedi72
Ffmpeg & vscode

------
zantana
Kodi. It's amazing how far that project has come since xbmc.

------
eksemplar
Trello, draw.io, visual studio code.

~~~
tmnvix
Thanks for mentioning draw.io. After a quick look around I can see that it
will be very useful. I especially like the interface. If it wasn't for my
browser interface above I would swear this is a very well made desktop app.
Standard OS inputs used well are hard to beat. This really makes me think
twice about using some of the fancy UI libraries out there.

------
satanic_pope
Pycharm (community edition) - you gotta use it to believe it. Incredible piece
of software.

Dropbox (basic) - Support across platforms with cli.

~~~
LittlePeter
Count me in for PyCharm Community Edition

~~~
senatorobama
Not all of us have 32G RAM.

------
electic
\- Visual Studio Code.

\- iTerm2

------
gschrader
There was a recent reddit post about this as well here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7x639l/what_free...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7x639l/what_free_software_is_so_good_you_cant_believe)

------
sdfjkl
FreeBSD. The quality of the code (and documentation!) is a notable step up
from Linux.

------
tmikaeld
Group Office

[https://sourceforge.net/projects/group-
office/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/group-office/)

Amazingly complete CRM system with a robust and fast web based IMAP client.

------
Kraftwurm
Not free, but much too cheap for what you get :) Affinity Photo + Affinity
Designer: [https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/](https://affinity.serif.com/en-
gb/)

~~~
adimitrov
Well, if you want something for editing photos that is truly free as in beer
and speech, try the awesome darktable:
[https://www.darktable.org/](https://www.darktable.org/)

I'm also always blown away by how incredibly easy to use and at the same time
how powerful hugin is. In this long list of for-pay stitching applications,
Hugin is the only one of two which are free (again, beer and speech)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_photo_stitching_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_photo_stitching_software)

------
gmiller123456
Cygwin. Yea, it's mostly just a collection of other free tools, but most of us
in corporate America still find ourselves using Windows, and Cygwin is the
only thing that makes the Windows command prompt bearable.

------
jpavlick
Chrome

------
kisstheblade
On a related note I have been wondering why artist's never provide quality
content for free. You know graphics/images for games etc and music/sound
effects for example.

Coders provide software worth billions in man hours for free and trying to
find quality "artistic" content is impossible. Every little clip art image
costs many dollars.

Why do coders provide their services for free so generously while artists are
mainly worried about their copyrights?

~~~
detaro
Not true in that absolute: There is tons of freely licensed music out there.
You can find free game assets for genres that are somewhat "generic". But
still it is a thing, a few theories on contributing factors:

a) More typically an individual work, with one person having a vision that
they do not want to have compromised by others. Arguably harder to have
contributions in a way that doesn't stand out in many cases, which means one
work made by a small army of contributors sharing the workload doesn't happen
often.

b) the "work for me for free" demands are worse for artists than for coders.
"Freeloading" is seen a lot more critically/abusive than in software circles.
(although it does happen with open-source projects as well of course, and
long-term maintainers burn out accordingly as well).

c) approximately nobody pays artists to produce freely licensed works

d) free work by artists might be in direct competition to their ability to
make money from their art.

e) Parts vs final product: a lot of open-source development is in pieces that
other projects build on. Similarly, you can find quite a lot of "pieces" of
art for free: sound templates, stock/reference images, textures, ..., which is
not very visible to someone looking for "free graphics". Similarly to how many
people not involved with software do not understand on what mountain of free
libraries a lot of software stands.

f) More visible if reused, which leads users of graphic resources to want
individual ones instead of the same as everyone else. E.g. games will more
likely stand out by graphics but use the same engine as X other games.

------
threatofrain
It's not open source, but I'm surprised that world-class software like Google
Drive / Docs are free.

~~~
ferbivore
I stopped using both of those due to how distinctly not world-class they are.

~~~
newbear
And what did you switch to?

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amriksohata
Kazaa lite codecs, classic media player, Vs code, Google docs and most Google
products, freely, android

~~~
bonzini
> Google

It's paid by advertisers. Docs and mail are just the Trojan horse to get you
to use Google for searching.

~~~
matt_the_bass
I think their value to google is to hook users into googles paid services. We
spend $60 year per user at my company.

------
kbouck
Elasticsearch

~~~
lowry
Utter crap, look at their source code. Lucene, on the other hand, is really
good.

------
ivcha
Eclipse -- one of the best and most versatile IDEs, especially for JVM
languages

------
kawera
PostgreSQL, Redis and SQLite.

------
matt_the_bass
Inkscape for vector graphics. I feel it firmly competes with illustrator.

------
fellellor
Python. I'm not really surprised it's free, but it is good.

------
Ace17
gcc and llvm!

~~~
nixpulvis
And the myriad of languages build on top of them, mainly Rust these days ;)

------
appwiz
emacs, especially with butterfly mode
([https://xkcd.com/378/](https://xkcd.com/378/))

------
iurisilvio
New Relic. Unfortunately it reduced their free plan (and the paid plan is
expensive), but I was always amazed about their free features. I'm still
didn't find a good alternative. :(

------
gupi
Freenas, for sure!

------
fsloth
Wolframalpha.com

------
ahendy
lichess.org

------
carlosgg
R

------
blesswinsamuel
Telegram.

------
sgillen
Valgrind and gdb for me.

------
RickJWag
Linux, of course.

------
eitland
Netbeans, Eclipse

------
neilharbinger
Adobe Brackets

------
eitland
The free (as in free beer) version of Manic Time.

------
nojvek
Vscode

------
leleItaly
emacs

------
JensRantil
MySQL

------
methyl
Figma

------
z92
tesseract-ocr CMU-sphinx

and such.

------
dudado
Mac OS X

------
purplezooey
cowsay

------
RobGav
Definitely Publii - open source Static CMS with GUI and themes.
Https://getpublii.com

