
Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives? - safwan
Open Source is changing the tech industry. But there are still a lot of space where the closed source proprietary software is the only player.<p>Can you comment some of the space? So a person who is thinking about creating a new open source project can get the idea and start making a alternative?
======
brudgers
Excel alternatives might be uncountable. Implementing spreadsheet basics is an
advanced beginner exercise. But even Google’s billions only get it a distant
second best because Microsoft is still working hard despite the lead. Sure
Google and Apple can meet most needs most of the time. They’re good enough
mainly because they are free beer. Not because they are open source.
Obviously.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a GNU fanboy at heart. But I dont believe in magically
willing well engineered software into existence. It takes resources fungible
with money. Projects with cash are at an advantage. Projects with cash,
motivation and years of experience in the codebase are the ones that dominate.
Not starting from scratch becomes a huge advantage.

A new project in a space needs to find an unserved market segment _with
resources fungible with money._ That’s why successful developers’ tools are
easy and CAD programs hard.

If you want to make an alternative, just make it and learn from what happens.
Because what everyone wants is a free iPhone. Good luck.

~~~
iforgotpassword
I'm not an Excel user. Genuinely curious: Is it really that the alternatives
are worse, lacking features, unstable, or does it come down to "they're not
Excel", in that they're not a drop in replacement that can perfectly load and
run every Excel sheet ever created.

Because that would be my gut feeling: Not interoperable enough, since some
things just work differently, but not necessarily much worse. If you can't
send your sheets to company b without being sure they can properly use it,
it's worthless. Pretty much the same problem with Word.

~~~
neeeeees
A PM that worked on Excel in the late 2000s explained it to me like this: Most
people use about 20% of the features in Excel - which should make it easy for
competitors to copy, right? The kicker is that different people/industries
tend to use a “different 20%” of the features, making the barrier to really
compete very high.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The kicker is that different people/industries tend to use a “different 20%”
> of the features, making the barrier to really compete very high.

The thing is that different job functions that are exposed to overlapping user
bases in the same industry (and even office) use a different 20%. If it was
just per-industry variation, it would be easy for industry-specific
competitors to succeed, but the parts of Excel used actively by Andrew, who
makes a tool that is also consumed by Bob and Carol are different than those
used actively by Bob and Carol (which also differ from each other, and which
each have their own users who rely on the tool and the features it relies on,
even though they don't actively use the features.)

------
sansnomme
High level multiphysics, RF, and CAD tools and simulators. Autodesk, Ansys
etc. still dominate the field. The state of tools like OpenFoam is like the
early days of Gimp and KiCad; theoretically possible to use but only if your
background is in software engineering and/or if you are really, really poor
and desperate e.g. a grad student on a tight budget. If you look at software
like open source FTDT sims, almost all requires specifying layouts, project
settings, and designs in ridiculously long config files that would put JS
build tools to shame. If you are lucky, you might be able to design your model
using a proper GUI e.g. Gmsh. If you are not, be prepared to start drawing out
your model with a text editor, point by point. Imagine creating SVGs by hand,
that's how ludicrous it is. Most of the "open source" stuff are grad projects,
more of an exercise in show and tell than anything serious. Sure it is
perfectly possible to specific the cross section of an airplane wing by hand.
By the time you are done with that your colleagues using proper GUI tools have
already ran their simulation and published three papers.

For those who are interested, one promising project is SU2:

[https://su2code.github.io/](https://su2code.github.io/)

~~~
kwk1
One of the goals of the FreeCAD project [1] is to be a high-level interface
for tools like OpenFOAM (via the CfdOF workbench [2]), and other
solvers/meshers like CalculiX, Elmer, Gmsh, and Netgen.

Its modular, workbench-based, Python-around-C++ core approach provides an
environment for people to make their own specialized tools, like the Arch
Rebar tool [3] that was created as part of a Google Summer of Code project.
[4] like airfoil design as you mentioned. There was a recent forum thread
started by people interested in doing exactly that. [5]

[1] [https://freecadweb.org/](https://freecadweb.org/)

[2]
[https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewforum.php?f=37](https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewforum.php?f=37)

[3]
[https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Arch_Rebar](https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Arch_Rebar)

[4]
[https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?t=22760](https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?t=22760)

[5]
[https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=41159&start...](https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=41159&start=10)

~~~
fake-name
I recently spent time at work trying to get OpenFOAM to do, well, anything
using FreeCAD. I couldn't get it to _install_ properly on linux _or_ windows.

On windows, you're supposed to use some part of their autoinstaller through
the freecad UI, which apparently didn't set some environment variable
somewhere. On linux, I had package incompatibilities (using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS).

It... needs work.

~~~
kwk1
> It... needs work.

Hah, very true. I have been working directly with OpenFOAM upstream to improve
the packaging situation on Debian/Ubuntu but unfortunately I didn't get
started in time for the 18.04 release. It's a bit tricky too in that many
FreeCAD developers use Linux but I would bet most of our potential engineering
end-users would be on Windows. Thanks for your feedback.

~~~
fake-name
If they had a PPA, it would solve the issue.

The problem is they don't.

------
DoofusOfDeath
I think the definition of "good" matters a lot here.

Consider Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom. Many people (including me) would
love to see those supported on Linux, or even better, be out-classed by open-
source software, e.g. Gimp and Darktable.

Gimp and Darktable truly are wonderful pieces of software. But they aren't yet
compelling enough to cause a mass-migration by professional photographs.
Another example would be Microsoft Office vs. LibreOffice.

So you may need to refine your goals a little: Do you want to (a) fill a gap
where _no_ viable OSS exists, or (b) help OSS dethrone proprietary software in
some category, e.g. Photoshop?

> So a person who is thinking about creating a new open source project can get
> the idea and start making a alternative?

I cringe when I read that, because I've asked that question many times for
myself, and I never ended up following through. I think there's some wisdom in
the notion that the best OSS project idea is one that solves a problem _you_
have. Otherwise it's just too hard to really see it through.

~~~
safwan
> So you may need to refine your goals a little: Do you want to (a) fill a gap
> where no viable OSS exists, or (b) help OSS dethrone proprietary software in
> some category, e.g. Photoshop?

Filling a gap where not OSS exists. I was trying to understand the gap. Like,
many people are saying there are huge gap in CAD technologies, but this can be
only solved by the persons who have domain knowledge, like Civil Engineers.
Unless the people having the domain knowledge does not agree to volunteer or
take the inatiative, no one will see any progress in that field.

> I think there's some wisdom in the notion that the best OSS project idea is
> one that solves a problem you have

Yeah, it is true. Like I am facing about a problem with APM that there are no
or open core alternative of proprietary. Untill this post, I did not know
other people are also thinking about its need.

~~~
jart
People do volunteer and take initiative. Then they get hired by Adobe.

------
Mizza
Two that I have encountered:

Aspera: a high-performance data transfer suit, used in genetics and the film
industry. I wrote a blog post about it a year ago and still get near-daily
emails asking me if there is an open source alternative yet. QUIC may provide
a basis for a solution, but it needs to be explored.

PDMS: software for planning, modeling and simulating oil and gas plants. Main
two commercial suites are AVEVA PDMS and Autocad Plant 3D. AVEVA PDMBS is
upwards of $1,000 per seat per month (!), so not feasible for projects which I
have in mind (more on that in the new year). I'd imagine that Blender could be
used as a starting point for a Free alternative, but I'm not sure. This is a
tougher one.

[1] [https://www.ccdatalab.org/blog/a-desperate-plea-for-a-
free-s...](https://www.ccdatalab.org/blog/a-desperate-plea-for-a-free-
software-alternative-to-aspera)

~~~
spectramax
Open source projects tend to emerge when there is general access to the
purpose of that project. You can't expect an open source project for Ocean-
based Wind Turbine simulation or molecular synthesis of Organochloride
compounds.

They're niche industries that require tremendous amount of upfront investment,
in both physical assets to realize the utility of the open-source project, and
knowledge-base required to operate the software.

On the other hand, you could have a piece of software that requires niche
knowledge but its used literally everywhere - for e.g. OpenSSL. Not many
people can contribute to it, yet it exists as open source. The point I am
trying to make is that OpenSSL and your quantum hardware control software are
very different things.

~~~
Mizza
I actually respectfully disagree with this. In my travels, I have encountered
many situations where very niche, industry-specific software is completely
Free and Open Source, and I have encountered situations where commonly-used,
widely useful software is proprietary with no Free solution.

On the Free side, I think one reason is the copyleft nature of the GPL.
Another pattern indicator is how modular the software is - smaller bits are
easier to open source than massive projects - and the general inclinations of
the programmers, their bosses, and their legal teams.

That being said, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a Free alternative
to AutoCAD in 2020. (Pipes 3D is an AutoCAD extention). It's widely used
software across numerous industries, much like Photoshop, Illustrator or
Audition, but there is no Free alternative that I'm aware of.

A particularly annoying thing to me here is that AVEVA was actually originally
developed and owned by the British government, but it was privatized (I think
under Thatcher.) I think the value created for the tax payer would have been
much greater to create free tools and software and make them available to
everybody rather than just whatever pittance they got from selling it during a
privatization firesale.

~~~
safwan
The reason of not having a open source alternative of CAD is not having proper
domain knowledge. The people who have the domain knowledge are not taking that
intiative that the early stage software engineers took.

------
ufmace
There's tons of highly specialized vertical market software that will
basically never have open-source alternatives. Every industry has a few
examples. I at least know of the high-end CAD, FEA, and CFD software used in
certain branches of engineering. See Ansys, Autodesk, etc. The reason why is
that building this type of software correctly requires an immense amount of
domain knowledge. That type of knowledge doesn't come together in a useful way
without a lot of money.

Such software also doesn't get used enough to be trustworthy as far as results
without some other big companies using it to do things with and testing the
results. What company is going to trust their product designs to the results
of a bunch of open-source code with no company standing behind it?

~~~
jbay808
I don't understand why there isn't an industrial consortium supporting an open
source CAD standard. Enough companies depend on proprietary software that they
already pay a fortune for that they could front the cost of software
development to save money in the long run.

~~~
scholia
(1) Cost of software is relatively small compared with the cost of employing
the people who use it.

(2) Cost of software is relatively small compared with the cost of retraining
staff and changing business workflows and processes to cope with different
software.

(3) Changing to new software is relatively simple compared with the problems
of making all your staff, your contractors and your suppliers change to new
software.

(4) Even if changing to new software was relatively simple and cheap, there
would be massive risks in doing it. If you are designing nuclear power
stations, nuclear submarines, skyscrapers, bridges or whatever, the cost of
mistakes can run into the billions, or be fatal for a significant number of
people.

(5) Bonus point: making this kind of switch could take a decade and could end
up not saving you any money (cf Munich trying to switch to open source). Not
many CEOs will attempt it because they are more focused on the next quarter's
results. Anyway, in many if not most companies, the benefits -- if any --
would accrue to whoever the-next-CEO-after-the-next-CEO happens to be. And who
really cares about that?

It's hard enough to get most people to change their email client or their text
editor or whatever when the alternatives are free and the real-world risks are
negligible. Getting them to change the software on which their whole business
survival is based is another matter.

Moral: changing business software is not as simple as it seems if you only
look at the software and don't look at the whole business plus the whole
industry infrastructure of related businesses. It's never as simple as people
think.

~~~
labawi
(5) Munich might not be a valid example. Parent talked about a consortium, for
which a single city administration might be a bit small, and AFAIK the failure
was not necessarily technical.

~~~
scholia
Belated reply (Christmas!)

> the failure was not necessarily technical

Well, that was exactly my point ;-)

If you only look at the technical issues, ur doin it rong.

------
wallacoloo
Video editing.

There’s Kdenlive and OpenShot that are maybe the most well-established, but
they we’re both very buggy the last time I dealt with them, and they’re
nowhere _near_ featureful as what’s available commercially.

I think we could benefit from a well-know MovieMaker equivalent. Something
that isn’t featureful, but is _reliable_ (read: doesn’t crash) and intuitive.

~~~
pinouchon
I'am about to try DaVinci Resolve as an alternative to Premiere (I used
Premiere in the past). But I don't want to fork $20 per month because I don't
use it that often. A good opensource video editing software (or NLE non-linear
editing as they call it) would be great.

~~~
arvinsim
Wait, isn't DaVinci Resolve a one time purchase of $299? Or am I missing
something?

~~~
gen3
They have a free version thats good enough for a lot of people. I'm assuming
they use that.

------
_bxg1
There might be an opening for an OSS alternative to game engines like Unity
and Unreal. There are scores of open-source game _frameworks_ out there, but
there's nothing I'm aware of that comes close to the ease-of-use and cross-
platform-build support that Unity has. Of course, you might have an uphill
battle because both of the above are free for smaller projects and have fairly
generous pricing models that scale based on income.

~~~
krilly
Godot is what you are talking about. It seems to be doing very well. It's MIT
licensed, and has official support for C#, C++ and their own Lua-like
scripting language.

~~~
skocznymroczny
Godot might be it in the future... but not yet.

It seems to focus on 2D for now, almost all the showcase games for it are 2D
also. I don't think it's been battletested enough in 3D yet.

------
mwattsun
This article about how Microsoft Access won't die got me thinking about
creating an open source alternative. I just retired and am looking for a
project. I also have a history with msft that might be helpful.

[https://medium.com/young-coder/microsoft-access-the-
zombie-d...](https://medium.com/young-coder/microsoft-access-the-zombie-
database-software-that-wont-die-5b09e389c166)

~~~
mamcx
This is my pet peeve. I'm already working in a relational language
([http://tablam.org](http://tablam.org)) to use as the core.

My dream is to have not only an Access/Excel(in the role of pseudo-table
programming) alternative, but one that could work great in a iPad/mobile
device.

Also, in this space, most "options" are fully on the cloud.

Thats cool, but will never be a _real_ challenger to Access or Excel if depend
on cloud 100%. I need it to work fully standalone.

My first programming language was FoxPro. I know what it look like to "live
the dream". One single language and environment and you TRULY code ALL the
app: Db, logic, forms, reports, web services, etc.

\---

BTW: why start with a relational lang? The MAIN power of the dbase/fox family
above access was to have a truly tailored language for the task. With office,
you MUST work from a paradigm (Access:Relational, Excel:Reactive functional)
and become an inferior procedural maybe OO developer (VBA) to finish stuff.
The dissonance is heavy.

~~~
clausok
I interviewed with a quant hedge fund in 2004 whose systems where all in
FoxPro. They loved it. The general partner of the fund believed that Microsoft
had figured out that they could unbundle FoxPro into 3+ components (DB, IDE,
Reports...) and sell each separately. It's been a mystery to me why no one,
using sqlite as the DB foundation, has attempted a modern-day FoxPro\MsAccess-
like tool.

~~~
mamcx
Using sqlite will be good. This is part of my plan (to build on top of sqlite
(better) or lmdb (crazy!). Honestly sqlite, not kid ourselves).

P.D: I think for a company like MS FoxPro was not a good business, but it
could be very good for a smaller player. Fox have a decent market and was very
loved by the community.

------
l0b0
Focus on what you know. Make sure your team includes at the very least (in no
particular order):

\- Someone who is _part of the target audience._ They should be able to
provide your team with a good idea of the features you absolutely need to get
started, and might be a good source of ideas for differentiating features.

\- Someone great at _manual quality assurance_ \- user testing, poking the
system through the laughably complex and diverse devices we all use, and
ideally translating manual test scripts to automated ones, where possible.
Lots of software has massive amounts of features hidden behind a broken UI.

\- Someone great at _UX,_ in particular related to the type of UI you are
building. Web UX is not the same as desktop or API UX.

\- Someone great at _automated quality assurance_ \- TDD, CI/CD, linting,
fuzzing, code & user metrics, telemetry, performance and stress testing. They
keep your progress from stalling over time.

\- Someone _trusted by the entire team to plan, direct and arbitrate._ They
avoid double work, keep the team going in the same direction, and keep
interactions human rather than textual (which has far too low bandwidth to
avoid conflict in the long term).

For most features you'll want _all_ of these involved in the planning at the
same time (and place, if at all possible), to get the most out of everyone's
time. They'll all be able to see how the work fits together and will provide
unforeseen insights and questions crucial to building an excellent product.

------
gitgud
3D CAD software is light years behind in the open source ecosystem, but
competing with Solid Works or Auto Desk is a enormous task... Although Blender
seems to be catching up in 3D animation!

~~~
safwan
CAD software like AutoCad does not have any good Open Source alternative. As
it is mostly used by Civil Engineers, I think when the Civil Engineers will
motivated by the Open Source manifesto, they will approach making soemthing
good alternative of CAD software!

~~~
burfog
CAD is far from just something for civil engineers.

It's used by mechanical engineers. It's what you use to design an engine. Good
CAD software hooks up to the inventory system so that parts can be ordered
automatically.

It's used by electrical engineers. Special CAD packages exist for integrated
circuit design, magnetics, and antennas. For example a motor might contain
coils of wire, permanent magnets, air, and various components through which
magnetic field lines are directed. Eddy currents must be analysed.

It's used by chemical engineers. Pipes and tanks and pumps get laid out. Stuff
like water hammer must be accounted for, except maybe the fluid is poisonous
and explosive. Expansion joints for thermal stress and pressure changes might
be important. Stress on welds must be calculated.

------
pathartl
Not completely on topic, but I fear we're rapidly losing many video games of
yesteryear to time and their closed-source nature. Luckily, milestone games
like Doom and Quake were open sourced some time ago.

There's reverse engineering of some codebases like Rollercoaster Tycoon,
Diablo, and Super Mario 64, but for 99% of games we'll never see them outside
of the original release or an emulator.

~~~
muzani
I learned programming mostly from reverse engineering open source games. Would
be great to see this happen more.

~~~
benologist
I would love to see a pervasive culture of copying proprietary games as open
source projects, which we see with a lot of non-game software. Open source
should be keeping old games alive and loved, instead old games are being
clawed back to re-monetize.

There is some open source games, but not many and all the old console games
are simple and graphically/audio simple, all the old PC games, it's really
only modern AAA titles that have tons of complex assets and would be hard to
'open source clone of X'.

------
berbec
Exchange. Imap and friends don't provide the seamless functionality that
Exchange does. Contacts, calendar, permission sharing, group message folders.
You just can't get close. I love OSS, but I have to recommend Exchange because
their is no viable alternative.

~~~
montjoy
This is true but happily I will never run it again thanks to office 365 and
gmail.

------
jimbob45
The IDA disassembler is pretty irreplaceable. Or at least it was until the NSA
released Ghidra - I haven't tried it to know.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Disassembler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Disassembler)

~~~
TACIXAT
I feel Binary Ninja (closed source) is kicking both their asses in terms of UI
and API. Ghidra feels really dated to me. IDA is incredibly expensive. Another
open source alternative would be radare.

------
indentit
ManyCam - software that creates a virtual webcam on Windows and thus allows
one to:

\- use one physical webcam in multiple apps simultaneously

\- switch which physical webcam software is using seamlessly

\- add live video effects

\- use a static image or video file as the webcam source

(If there is something like this already, then I have missed it!)

~~~
DarrisMackelroy
OBS Studio has a plugin that enables virtual webcam output on windows. I’ve
used it to create a more reliable webcam output from Blackmagic capture cards,
as not all software likes to recognize the included webcam driver.

[https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-
virtualcam.539/](https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.539/)

~~~
stuntkite
I've been doing a lot of RGBd scanner stuff in the last few years. "Volumetric
Video" as some people call it. The Intel RealSense platform has been a boon
and the new Kinect with Linux SDK is cool but with some of the things I've
been trying to do to build composite scenes from multiple devices or
recordings I hit a wall that could be summed up as lack of virtual webcam
support. I haven't hacked on OBS much but have used it quite a bit. This looks
like a fantastic example to investigate for useful patterns to leverage.

Thanks for sharing!

------
LinuxBender
There are some projects that have solutions, but not great ones. My definition
of great is something that people with very little technical knowledge can set
up themselves, correctly and securely. This is based on my experience, trying
to show non technical people how to self host some things.

\- File, email self hosted and e2e encryption has Nextcloud, but only
technical people can set it up. There should be a happy-clicky thing that non
technical people could set up and it would force them to do it the right way,
because the right way is the easy way. By happy-clicky, I mean, they create an
account on any VPS provider, then click "add service", say how big to let it
scale to, define what domain name to use and they are done.

\- Web based chat servers that scale. Again, there are web front-ends, like
Convos and TheLounge you can put in front of IRCD, but non technical people
don't have the patience to set up IRC networks and put web front-ends on them.
If there was a happy-clicky solution that used RPC over HTTPS or something to
negotiate clusters and all the person has to do is point DNS to it, then more
people would self host chat.

\- File sharing. If there was something lighter weight than NextCloud that
could auto-scale in any VPS provider and could be deployed from each VPS
provider, then more people would self host. I almost wrote something like this
out of necessity but so many people were using dropbox, I abandoned it.

In summary, I think the gap that needs to be filled is to have more projects
that integrate into VPS providers (by the VPS provider) and be part of their
VM deployment system, so that anyone can deploy them easily. Maybe there could
even be a business model around integrating 3rd party services into each of
the VPS providers, following some non vendor specific standard, that all the
VPS providers could set up. Linode, Vultr, AWS, Azure, Softlayer, OVH,
Hetzner, Digital Ocean, etc... and no code specific to any of them. All of
them should have a standard API that services can be integrated into and then
easily deployed securely and correctly by less than technical people.

~~~
Strom
> _There should be a happy-clicky thing that non technical people could set up
> and it would force them to do it the right way, because the right way is the
> easy way._

Absolutely! There should be a default configuration path that is easily
accessible. That is to say, the non technical user can basically just click
Install and answer maybe one question and everything else is automatic with
good defaults. Any additional choice will just cause pain, because non
technical people won't have the knowledge to make informed choices.

> _By happy-clicky, I mean, they create an account on any VPS provider, then
> click "add service", say how big to let it scale to, define what domain name
> to use and they are done._

This is crazy if we're talking about non technical users. A non technical user
won't know what a VPS even is. They won't know what a service is or why they
should add one. They won't know what scale means. Is it the one in the
bathroom? What's a domain name?

Supporting federation of hosting with various VPS providers can be useful for
advanced technical users but any mention of it should be avoided for a non
technical audiance. There has to be a sane default choice made already for all
these questions.

~~~
neltnerb
Maybe just ask how big they want their mailbox to be with estimated monthly
costs at each size? That will match up to the experience of buying things on
the internet. Give a way to increase the size later and make clear they can do
it and it should feel like a pretty safe question to ask.

------
wskemper
I'm surprised no one has said "PowerPoint" yet. LibreOffice and Google Slides
are nowhere close. Animations, theming, diagramming tools... I run an Ubuntu
laptop and have been missing PowerPoint so much I tried to get a Windows VM
for it. Couldn't get graphics support in VirtualBox working correctly :(

~~~
copperx
I find PowerPoint to be the most easily replaceable program in the Office
suite because effective presentations do not depend on cool animations or
themes to get the message accross. The best presentations I've seen have had
black text on a plain white background with clear and precise language. Either
that or presentations that only consist of images or diagrams and no text.

------
m_ke
An open source API compatible alternative to CUDA / CUDNN would be great.
Nvidia owns the deep learning ecosystem due to CUDNN.

------
indentit
A Lego-CAD tool for touchscreens i.e. Android tablets. I've used LeoCAD on
Linux, which isn't bad but finding parts is a nightmare. And the existing non-
OSS alternative on Android, Draw Bricks, doesn't support many special bricks
like those from Simple Machines.

------
krick
It's harder to names ones that do, really. It's easy to find some
"alternative" to most famous software packets, but despite people repeatedly
naming all the same programs (known to pretty much anyone interested anyways),
none of them can replace, say, photoshop.

So, out of my head (and, yeah, all of them have "alternatives" no serious user
would ever switch to):

Ableton Live

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Premiere

AutoCAD

Microsoft Office (Excel in particular)

Google Calendar (self-hosted)

VisualStudio of Jetbrains IDEs

~~~
hiram112
> Jetbrains IDEs

The Community Edition of IntelliJ, at least, from which all the others derive
(I believe) is open source.

[https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-
community](https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community)

~~~
krick
But you'll still spend money on PhpStorm (or whatever) and for a good reason.
Besides, community edition very much does have open source alternatives: I
cannot think of a reason it couldn't be replaces by, say, Eclipse. So it
doesn't really mean anything.

------
eitland
Google Desktop Search (it is dead now anyway). Was brilliant while it lasted.

There were some other alternatives as well but I think GDS starved them to
death before Google got bored and killed GDS. (Please le me know if there are
good alternatives, free/paid/open source, everything is interesting as long as
they fo the same things GDS did and can convince me that they don't upload my
data.)

~~~
yazan94
I personally use an app called Everything[1] since I moved to win10. Win10's
search indexing seems to be trash and its tendency to prioritize web results
over desktop results is infuriating. Everything is good for finding something
tucked away on your hard drive(s), is dead simple to use (give it a few
minutes the first time around to index everything, then just search). I wish I
could replace the existing Cortana with it or something else rather than
opening a different app, but alas When in Windows, do as Microsoft demands.

[1] [https://www.voidtools.com/](https://www.voidtools.com/)

~~~
copperx
It's amusing how simple Everything is: it just searches the file database in
Windows by name. It doesn't search file contents. I am not sure why this isn't
the way Windows search works.

------
absorber
Ableton Live and/or Bitwig Studio

I don't think anything comes even remotely close to the level of productivity
and rapid experimentation / prototyping these DAWs can bring to the table.

~~~
Mizza
It's not quite the same thing, but VCV Rack is making incredible and rapid
progress into becoming a fully fledged DAW. I find myself using Ableton less
and less and Rack more and more. Check it out!

~~~
absorber
Yes, I'm aware of VCV Rack and it is an amazing open source project. I use
Bitwig Studio though, and having The Grid there (which is Bitwig's own modular
environment, introduced in v3) is just too convenient to use another one next
to it.

------
ldevs3b
As a developer who is getting into the computer hardware tinkering / desktop
building hobbies it is very surprising to find an absence of open source
alternatives to the popular computer hardware info / benchmarking / stress
testing tools used by the community, for the PC / x86 platform at least.
Popular hardware info tools like CPU-Z, GPU-Z, HWMonitors are all closed
sourced, and benchmarking tools like Cinebench as well.

The only open source alternative I was able to find was CPU-X, an alternative
to CPU-Z:

[https://github.com/X0rg/CPU-X](https://github.com/X0rg/CPU-X)

Another example is I recently got interested in purchasing second hand GPUs
and most of the cards found online would have their vbios modded for crypto
mining, and to restore to a default bios most people would use the ATIFlash /
NVFlash utilities from TechPowerUp. I got interested in how such a utility
would work for modern GPUs and to no avail, I could not find any open source
tools that would demonstrate the capabilities of these tools

~~~
jmercouris
A good reason why some of the benchmarking software is closed source is
because it makes it harder for vendors to design ways to circumvent the point
of the tests (which is often to test the speed of the hardware).

~~~
codr7
To me that sounds like just another flavor of security through obscurity, as
some vendors will undoubtedly get their hands on the information since the
stakes are so high, which defeats the entire line of reasoning. If the source
was public, at least the playing field would be level.

------
m_ke
Uber/Seamless/Postmates/Airbnb or any other middleman service. There's no
reason why they should be getting away with extracting 30-40% of the revenue
for facilitating a simple transaction.

~~~
jakemal
I think this is something that seems reasonable at first, but in practice
would get incredibly unwieldy. There is much more to what they do than connect
buyers and sellers. They also resolve conflicts, navigate different laws in
countless locales, and handle payments/chargebacks to name a few.

These companies are also taking a giant cut _but still losing money_. Granted
they are spending money on things that an open source alternative wouldn't
necessarily spend money on, but I don't think very many of them are anywhere
close to being profitable even without the extra spending.

~~~
m_ke
In some cases they did pave the way and "resolve" legal challenges, which
makes it a lot easier for an open platform to come in and take over.

All of these companies are following the ridiculous 0 to 1 monopoly model of
growth and are wasting a ton of money trying to capture any market that they
can get their hands on. It's not sustainable and the gig workers are paying
the price. There's no doubt that they're providing a valuable service that
could have spurred growth for the middle class, but instead they're using VC
money to undercut existing businesses in hope of building the next Google.

------
jszymborski
Despite how great Inkscape is, it's no where near Adobe Illustrator or
Affinity Designer (and you can't run them on WINE either).

~~~
stuntkite
Illustrator is such an amazing tool. It's my go to when I need to get an idea
out of my notebooks into the digital realm. Website flats, sketching turns of
an idea to get into blender, general art.

I love the work that the Inkscape team has done and it does do some stuff that
illustrator doesn't do easily but it's no where near a replacement for
illustrator. I haven't looked but I suspect it's not in their mission
statement to be a replacement for Illustrator.

Hats off to Adobe for producing the world class tools they produce so
consistently for basically the length of my adult life but man I think it
would be good if there was something that was aiming to be an open source
Illustrator alternative.

------
newhotelowner
Hotel PMS & operation.

We pay roughly $7000 per year. If I want api access it cost additional $700
per year. It took them 9 months to transfer the licence when I bought the
property.

~~~
bsder
> We pay roughly $7000 per year.

Erm, nobody is going to jump up and down to replace that software if that's
all you have to pay.

You can't get people to work on replacing Cadence, and that's a license that
is on the order of $1 million per person per year.

~~~
dualogy
I see some ~100 products at [https://www.cadence.com/en_US/home/tools/tools-
a-z.html](https://www.cadence.com/en_US/home/tools/tools-a-z.html) \-- which
one(s) did you have in mind?

~~~
bsder
Virtuoso is the VLSI layout editor/schematic toolset that is egregiously
expensive. However, I believe that Allegro (the PCB suite) is above $100K per
person per year.

A good example at the price range cited is ballroom dance competition
software. Dick Douglas created it a number of years ago and people gripe what
it costs (I think $1000 per comp or so) and the fact that it hasn't been
actively developed over the years. It would be very useful as open source
software--except that nobody seems to have the knowledge of what is needed
(Dick and his wife Liz have high domain knowledge of ballroom scoring and
competitions) and nobody is willing to take on the training/customer support
task.

This is, in my opinion, where software, in general, breaks down. Everybody
wants to be the developer of scalable software that doesn't scale support
costs--unfortunately, that's the _exception_ , not the rule.

(Link to the ballroom software:
[https://www.douglassassociates.com/](https://www.douglassassociates.com/))

------
xpasky
My dad aches after a good and powerful typesetting tool (for less technical
users than *TeX is aimed at), in the vein of the Ventura Publisher of old.
Nowadays it seems all about Adobe Indesign but the workflows seem inferior for
many book-type workloads. Scribus needs a lot of help.

------
thexa4
I wasn't able to find an open source alternative to Newrelic APM for ruby.

Perforce is also something that's very useful for game development but
relatively expensive.

~~~
billconan
Why’s perforce not replaceable by git?

~~~
cweagans
Perforce has a locking mechanism for files, which is important for the large
binary objects that are used in game development. Git doesn't really have that
concept, so it requires more out of band communication to make it work for
that use case.

Git LFS might handle this, but it's just not something that Perforce shops
have to even think about, train their people on, etc. It's just "there" and
there's somebody that they can call and yell at if things go wrong.

~~~
yellowapple
> Git doesn't really have that concept

Of locking files? Sure it does; if two people modify the same piece of code,
then there will be a merge conflict, and whoever's doing the merge will have
the opportunity to reconcile those two versions. It's like a lock, but you
don't have to think about it / explicitly lock and unlock the object you're
editing. Combine this with rebasing (git-speak for "switch to the branch into
which I want to merge and then try applying all the changes from my branch")
and you end up with a pretty coherent idea of what changed and in what order.

Having used both branch-oriented (like Git) and locking-oriented (not Perforce
specifically, but my current dayjob involves very similar version control
schemes), I vastly prefer the former. Less ceremony around doing things in
parallel, and less risk of development deadlocks (e.g. Alice locked A.cpp for
editing, Bob locked B.dds for editing, Alice now wants to edit B.dds, Bob now
wants to edit A.cpp, now Alice will have to revert her lock on A.cpp, wait for
Bob to do everything he needs to do, then relock A.cpp and redo her changes
all over again (probably also having to debug new things because of new bits
and pieces Bob added) - or Bob will have to do so for B.dds - and cue
fistfight in the breakroom).

\----

That all being said, binary files are indeed a weak spot for Git, so if you
really do want to version control your textures and models and sounds and
such, then sure, perhaps a different VCS tailored for that use-case would be
more ideal. In my experience, though, that tends to be an anti-pattern;
generally better to keep code and assets separate (I'm well aware that
tools/engines like e.g. Unity don't play the slightest bit nicely with that
separation), using separate version control systems tailored to the specific
content.

~~~
cweagans
Merge conflicts are definitely not the same thing as file locking. At the
point where you're getting a merge conflict, it's too late. How are you going
to resolve conflicts in an audio file?

File locking is a way to communicate _in advance_ that nobody should attempt
to make changes to a particular file until the lock is cleared. Merge
conflicts are communication in arrears (so to speak) and at that point, effort
has already been wasted by at least one person.

~~~
yellowapple
> How are you going to resolve conflicts in an audio file?

By choosing one and discarding the other, or by creating a new audio file that
incorporates both changes, just like one would do for any other file.

While I don't know if this exists, there's nothing theoretically preventing
the creation of a diffing/patching tool for audio/video files, detecting
insertions/deletions/replacements (perhaps by timestamp/frame rather than by
line) the same way `diff` does for text.

> at that point, effort has already been wasted by at least one person.

A file lock doesn't prevent that time waste; there's nothing stopping someone
from immediately overwriting it as soon as the first editor commits/releases
the lock (in which case the first edit was a complete waste of time).

~~~
joshuamorton
I don't quite think you understand how perforce works.

Locking the file is a signal not to work on it because someone else is
modifying it. There isn't currently software that supports semantic merging of
audio or video, so perforce says "someone is recoloring the asset, don't
change the animation until they're done, or you'll just have to do the work
again".

In the meantime, perforce prevents you from checking the file out. So you have
to explicitly and clearly bypass your source control to do what you suggest,
at which point someone rightfully yells at you.

~~~
yellowapple
> Locking the file is a signal not to work on it because someone else is
> modifying it

I know how file locking works. Like I've said before, my day job involves
using a locking-based version control system. My disdain for locking-based
version control comes specifically from having to put up with it instead of
using something sane like Git.

> So you have to explicitly and clearly bypass your source control to do what
> you suggest, at which point someone rightfully yells at you.

And yet that will inevitably happen anyway, because someone's breathing down
your neck to get that animation done and won't take "well I'm waiting for Bob
to finish recoloring first" as an answer. Cue the aforementioned fistfight
over whether Alice's animation or Bob's recoloring can happen first.

Or it'll inevitably happen due to the aforementioned risk of deadlock (Alice
is tweaking animations in a different order than Bob is tweaking textures, and
thus run into a situation where both are waiting on the other to release locks
on files; cue fistfight).

I've seen both cases happen repeatedly. All of those cases would've been
avoided had we used a version control system that used branches and merges
instead of locks and unlocks.

~~~
joshuamorton
> I've seen both cases happen repeatedly. All of those cases would've been
> avoided had we used a version control system that used branches and merges
> instead of locks and unlocks.

Well no, the failure modes would be different, but all of those things would
still cause problems with branching and merging, mostly because you can't
actually merge binary artifacts, only rebase.

And in a world where you can only rebase, locking actually makes sense.

~~~
yellowapple
> all of those things would still cause problems with branching and merging

The deadlock most certainly would not. One would get rebased on top of the
other, in the worst case.

(In the best case, Alice and Bob would both be committing/pushing to their
respective branches early and often, and could therefore look at each others'
branches and see what changed between them; if you really want to emulate
locking, you could do so pretty straightforwardly by checking if there are any
changes to that file in commits outside of your own branch's commit history,
and it should be doable to write automated tooling to that effect. All the
"benefits" of locking without getting in the way of anything.)

> And in a world where you can only rebase, locking actually makes sense.

Even in a world where you can only rebase, locking is far more of a hindrance
than a benefit, for the reasons already outlined.

------
tony
\- HiDPI support in desktops

Open source makes it hard. Too many choices. Apple and Microsoft have an army
and can decide an API from the top down and have an organization put resources
into making a consistent experience. Windows 10 and macOS have absolutely
beautiful scaling.

On Linux, fractional scaling crashes often. Wayland and Xorg having to handle
it separately adds further fragmentation.

PopOS is nice: [https://system76.com/pop](https://system76.com/pop).

\- Mail clients with streamlined UI's:

Geary is as close as you can get to Airmail (macOS) and Mailbird (Windows)

\- Window snapping:

Aero snap in Windows, Magnet in macOS. Gnome doesn't want to do quarter
scaling, despite it being a common sense request, and the extensions don't
like gTile don't use the same behavior at all - so basically it doesn't exist.

(Correction, Gnome seems open to doing it but needs help?
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/b7f3rl/any_future_pl...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/b7f3rl/any_future_plans_for_quarter_tiling/ejuj9si/))

On the other hand, Linux has amazing:

\- PDF readers. Every desktop environment seems to have its own PDF reader
that does a better job than any proprietary one. Okular, evince, mupdf, xpdf.
Any they're _lite_. Zero bloat.

\- Package management. Every distros package management experience and their
stock beats any app store. They don't force you to login.

\- Terminals. Kitty is fantastic
([https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/](https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/))

\- Input: ibus and fcitx

\- Access / Installing shared libraries _and_ headers. No need to download
xcode or grab Visual C++

\- Not open source, but Spotify, Chrome, Slack, Firefox, Steam all work good

------
bobosha
I feel Teamviewer needs an open-source alternative.

Many(all?) of the current remote access tools are nowhere near as simple/easy
to use as Teamviewer, hence it continued popularity.

------
ralphc
Salesforce CRM? Hosted CRM, with software for customization, built in
database, all that. Although I haven't looked around at alternatives.

------
billconan
photoshop. Gimp has the functionalities, but its usability is poor.

~~~
katsura
One time I started working on one open source alternative, but one big problem
I found was that their PSD file documentation was incorrect at a few places,
and it lags behind what is currently available.

And though Photopea[0] is not open source, it can mostly get things done for
my minimal use-cases.

[0] [https://www.photopea.com/](https://www.photopea.com/)

------
abetusk
Here's my list:

* Mood tracking software (e.g. Daylio [1]). Put owners in charge of their data for easy export and sharing

* Paper craft unfolding (e.g. Pepakura). Allow for 'automagic' unfolding but also user selectable joining/splitting of triangular islands.

* Machine learning oriented games (e.g. GWAP [3] (now defunct)). Open source games that allow for open data collection that can then be fed back into the community for machine learning.

* I've heard architecture software is abysmal and has no open source alternatives

* In browser CAD (e.g. OnShape [4]). In browser lowers the bar to accessibility.

* Photogrammetry/3d Scanning. There might be some open source alternatives but nothing that is as easily accessible as the David Scanner [5].

* Projection mapping. Again, there might be some open source alternatives but nothing that I've seen where I can buy a 'kit' with intuitive software to get up and running quickly (though I haven't looked too much in depth).

* Ultrasound machine. There's echOpen [6] but I don't know the status of that project.

* DNA sequencer. There was the Polonator [7] but it never became 'open source' and eventually died.

\---

[1] [http://daylio.webflow.io/](http://daylio.webflow.io/)

[2] [https://tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/](https://tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-
based_computation_game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-
based_computation_game)

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

[5]
[https://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaign/3Dscanner/overview.html?j...](https://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaign/3Dscanner/overview.html?jumpid=va_t1345uf8k6)

[6] [http://www.echopen.org/](http://www.echopen.org/)

[7]
[http://arep.med.harvard.edu/Polonator/](http://arep.med.harvard.edu/Polonator/)

------
mikewarot
Google Picasa - A photo organizer that works offline, and lets you run facial
recognition on your photos to organize and tag them.

It has a bug, and sometimes gets labels swapped if you have more than one in a
photo, which then metastasizes to corrupt the samples used to compare new
photos against.

It was awesome, and now it's gone.

------
notacoward
Open-source data storage is full of gaps compared to its commercial/bespoke
brethren. To give just one example, consider multi-tenancy/QoS. Very few OSS
distributed filesystems or object stores even seem to have heard of the
concept, and those few barely scratch the surface.

~~~
montjoy
Can you give a better example of what you mean? There are plenty of multi-
tenancy file systems. Do you mean QoS by user or over the network?

~~~
notacoward
> There are plenty of multi-tenancy file systems

Name one. What I mean by multi-tenant is that the namespace, security space,
capacity quota and I/O quota are fully isolated and managed _at the storage-
system API_ , not via other facilities such as cgroups which aren't even
applicable beyond a single-host level. Each tenant gets something that looks
like a private service with predictable limits (appropriate for an SLA)
regardless of what other tenants are doing, despite being on shared
infrastructure. Commercial vendors like NetApp and all the "hyperconverged"
crowd have support for this kind of isolation at the cluster level, as do some
bespoke storage systems such as the one I work on at Facebook, but in the
open-source world? Nada.

~~~
montjoy
Ok sure in that context I can’t think of any. The closest thing I know of
(with a limited understanding of what you mean) is NFS4.2.

------
based2
[https://helpwanted.apache.org/](https://helpwanted.apache.org/)

[https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/campaigns-
summaries#hpp](https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/campaigns-summaries#hpp)

~~~
safwan
It is about existing open source projects. It would be better to have some
idea about new open source projects that are not started yet but needed by the
community.

------
Kye
Music production software. Any of the proprietary options is better than the
best open source DAW like Audacity or Ardour. Even Reaper gets enough paying
customers to have a good combo notation editor/piano roll in it. Open source
has produced some good periphery stuff like Helm and MuseScore. LMMS is the
best of the bunch when it comes to open source DAWs.

That's not to say the open source stuff is bad. I get that they don't have the
resources to do as much UX refinement as the others. If you can't afford the
proprietary stuff or prefer open source, then you can get by. The actual audio
handling systems inside are probably world class.

------
qualqual
Qualitative Data Analysis systems. RQDA and QualCoder are under development,
but the pace is generally slow and many features are buggy and remain untested
on common operating systems. Some products out there on the market are better
than others (I use MaxQDA) but come at a hefty price, even with a student
discount.

Also transcription software. Not voice recognition, but software that assists
with manual transcription. I'm amazed that no open source alternative to F5
exists out there, since it's a relatively simple mechanism (keyboard shortcuts
to denote speaker, paste timestamp, include annotations, etc and ability spool
back to rewind 2 seconds).

~~~
ccbogel
Hi, qualcoder developer here. Yes qualcoder has some bugs, and limited testing
on Mac OS or Windows for now. However, thanks for the advice regards manual
transcription with key shortcuts, I will try and incorporate that idea. There
is another free qual web-based product called Taguette www.taguette.org which
you might be interested in.

------
hashworks
OneNote. There is only Xournal(pp) with a much smaller featureset and more
bugs.

------
ziotom78
Adobe Acrobat. Nothing in the open-source world has the same share of easiness
in editing PDF files. (Sorry, Okular.) Also, the ability to use the scanner to
produce multipage PDF files is unrivalled, IMO.

------
georgewsinger
Don't try to copy a closed-source project. Instead, invent something
completely new (something that's 10x better than what it might "replace"), and
make it open-source.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
... and half your potential user base will say "what the hell is this crap, it
is totally unintuitive and doesn't do the things i need it to" ... sigh.

~~~
rabidrat
Focus on the other half.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
She's busy.

------
based2
A real alternative to Outlook/Exchange/Active Directory.

------
tmaly
Video editing. Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro. I guess the price might
not be that high to justify, but still I have not seen anything like these as
open source.

~~~
w3clan
checkout "davinci resolve", "kdenlive"

------
aaron695
Clipboard manager

Given the hugely abstract data driven world we live in and the inability of
the human brain to have long term cache it should be important.

Open source versions exist but they are simply not up to scratch to paid
versions, they are simply crap to be honest. Most paid versions have demo
modes to see whats good but even the paid versions could do with improvements.

Don't get bogged down in making it work online. Keep it simple, runs locally.
Windows or maybe if possible Android.

~~~
lolinder
Out of curiosity, what do you need out of a clipboard manager that Ditto
(Windows) or CopyQ (cross-platform) don't offer?

------
znpy
Object databases. Strictly speaking, Versant object database by Actian (iirc)
is the only long standing player and the only actually working implementation.

~~~
sterlind
YES! my first job used an in-house object database, and it was magical (though
everyone else seemed to hate it.. I think they were just using it wrong.)

It had UML schema, Paxos replication, fine-grained transactions, cardinality
checking, reversible upgrades, etc. Application code ran in-process with the
database, and it made it really eady to do anything.

I'd love to contribute to an open-source version but probably can't since I've
read its code.

P.S. It fell out of favor because the systems that used it tended to be
monoliths that did too much to scale well. The "right way to do it," IMHO is
to build a central stateful brain with it, kick all asynchronous work out to
stateless worker microservices and read from active secondaries. If the
brain's only job is to mutate state by applying business logic, you can scale
quite far.

------
sehugg
FPGA tools, with few exceptions (IceStorm, SymbiFlow)

~~~
linuxlizard
Yeah, EDA
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation))
is way behind.

There are VHDL and some Verilog but from what (little) I understand, the
industry has moved to SystemVerilog and there Free (as in Speech) tools
haven't caught up.

------
krilly
Here are two projects which are doable, I think:

\- Paint.net: freeware windows mspaint replacement. Lightweight and simple UI,
but powerful features and extensions system. I hate having to boot up GIMP
just for editing a screenshot or something, but no other decent libre paint
alternative exists

\- SketchUp: this is to blender what paint.net is to GIMP. Super easy and
intuitive to create simple models. A joy to use.

~~~
pnako
There is an open source clone of Paint.net called Pinta, based on the original
source code of Paint.net.

It's not actively developed anymore, though.

------
Bostonian
I think businesses with complicated Excel spreadsheets using macros written in
VBA may be reluctant to switch to an open source spreadsheet.

------
rpastuszak
Sketch, Figma

------
bananapear
The operating system/firmware which runs on Sonos devices.

There was an link on the front page yesterday about “recycle mode” bricking
devices to prevent resale. I’m now slightly disgusted that I own one.

Sonos hardware has great speakers and great sound, but the software is flaky
(especially near microwave ovens) and requires a connection to Sonos servers
at all times.

------
caspervonb
Graphics and Design:

* Photoshop, GIMP is great but still a bit rough.

* Illustrator, Inkscape is great, but rough.

* Maya, Cinema4D: Blender is technically pretty good, UX is improving but still clunky. Even something like Silo would be pretty sweet (a fairly simple, pure 3d modeling program)

* Video editing: Is there really anything good out there? Last I tried the programs just straight out crashed.

------
zzo38computer
One such program is Everett Kaser Software's Hero Mesh puzzle game engine. I
have actually started writing Free Hero Mesh for this purpose, though (but it
is incomplete).

Another is a good alternative to the Microsoft BASIC compiler for DOS.
Although there are other BASIC compilers, they miss many things and don't work
with real mode.

------
vaibhavsagar
DJ software! AFAICT Mixxx is the strongest player in this space, and it
doesn't hold a candle to Serato/Traktor.

------
butz
Dual pane file manager with GUI, in other words: a proper alternative to Total
Commander on Linux. Fast, simple UI, has all required functionality built in
and can be extended using plugins. Krusader is probably closest one, but still
has few minor paper cut issues.

~~~
j88439h84
Ranger is great. [https://ranger.github.io/](https://ranger.github.io/)

It supports single- and multi-pane modes.

[https://github.com/ranger/ranger/blob/master/ranger/config/r...](https://github.com/ranger/ranger/blob/master/ranger/config/rc.conf#L23-L28)

------
_bxg1
GUI clients for SVN. There are plenty for git, but when I started working at
an SVN company I had no luck finding a free one. Ended up paying for SmartSVN,
which is okay but still not as good as even some of the OSS git clients.

~~~
chadcmulligan
Have you tried TortoiseSVN? A lot of IDE's have an SVN interface - Appcode,
IntelliJ, Xcode, Delphi etc

~~~
krilly
I'm not sure how similar it is, but TortoiseHg is the best version control GUI
I've used

------
tpfour
There is no good FOSS or even just open source RIS (Radiology Information
System).

------
lightedman
Video chat like Paltalk and CamFrog.

Specifically, one that will let you run your own server (Camfrog no longer
allows this) and others may connect to it through a public directory or via
direct IP address.

With unlimited camera feeds able to be opened.

------
gary__
What do people use for self service embedded analytics in SaaS applications?

~~~
safwan
What are the closed source softwares that are used for this purpose?

------
anotheryou
\- pdf editor

~~~
newnewpdro
I've used xournal for rudimentary edits like preparing tax forms.

------
ken
What’s your scope? One obvious answer is Google search.

------
atemerev
kdb+ time series database. An installation can cost >150,000 dollars per
year... for a 300 kB executable (yes, kilobytes). And it's worth it.

------
starpilot
SAP, other annoying enterprise software.

~~~
safwan
Odoo is good alternative

------
jdsalaro
Software for VJing, mapping images, light beams, etc to projectors, surfaces
or screens.

~~~
qmmmur
Open Frameworks?

------
bori5
Simulink

------
whalesalad
Microsoft Active Directory

------
memn0nis
There was another thread about Aspera on HN the other day.

------
smbullet
Anyone know if any of the FL Studio alternatives are good?

------
o-__-o
Cisco Cloudcenter.

------
wideasleep1
Google Cloud Messenger/Firebase.

------
realcr
A decent wysiwyg website builder.

~~~
chadcmulligan
Are there any? Why not square space and so on?

~~~
realcr
Isn't square space a paid solution?
[https://www.squarespace.com/pricing](https://www.squarespace.com/pricing)

------
jeena
Confluence, Jira, Photoshop

~~~
tdewitt
Agreed for two out of three but I've never used Photoshop. I think it's worse
for confluence. There are viable alternatives to jira but I've found nothing
even "good enough" to replace confluence and it sets a very low bar.

------
dt3ft
Octopus Deploy

~~~
paulstovell
It's free for small teams, and we can invite you to the GitHub org if you are
a customer.

------
lanius
foobar2000 (media player for Windows)

~~~
vladimir-y
[https://github.com/DeaDBeeF-Player/deadbeef](https://github.com/DeaDBeeF-
Player/deadbeef)

------
codingslave
Google search

------
nomy99
sketch

------
dominotw
airtable

splunk

------
creimers
airtable

------
metah
VLC

~~~
Madeindjs
It's already a FOSS software :
[https://www.videolan.org/vlc](https://www.videolan.org/vlc)

------
funviolence
palo alto firewall features:

apply policy based on AD user or group membership

block/apply protocols rather than ports (allow ssh doesn't care what port ssh
runs on)

advanced url categorization. allow Facebook but disallow Facebook chat

etc

------
villasv
Jenkins ([https://jenkins.io/](https://jenkins.io/)), but specially most of
its plugins.

I know it's already open source, but it lacks good FOSS alternatives.

------
alexfromapex
Microsoft Office because as soon as OpenOffice succeeded in supporting the
formats Microsoft updated to pptx, docx, etc. because they know it’s one of
the few things keeping people stuck with Windows machines for business.

