

Ask HN: What open source projects have had mass consumer adoption? - josephpmay

I constantly see developers on HN talking about open-source consumer projects they&#x27;ve worked on, or open-source alternatives of popular start-ups. I appreciate open-source as much as the next developer, and I often use Apache projects, GNU&#x27;s Not Unix tools, or open-source repositories in my projects. I struggle to think, however, of consumer-oriented open-source projects that have been successful. I know that open-source tools are the foundation for many start-ups, but I&#x27;m wondering about software that was actually developed for consumer end-users. The only ones I can think of are Firefox (but Mozilla is really run like a corporation that just so happens to be nonprofit) and 2048.
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phantom_oracle
A bit over-reaching, but wouldn't Android fit the bill here?

Last I recall, it is open-source and exists on like 200 million consumer
phones (definitely more by now).

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dandelion_lover
LaTeX definitely fits to your question.

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msantos
LibreOffice is fairly popular

