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Ask HN: Which project does not have any good open-source alternatives?

by safwan on 12/26/19, 4:23 PM with 277 comments

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.

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?

  • by brudgers on 12/26/19, 5:52 PM

    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.

  • by sansnomme on 12/27/19, 8:42 PM

    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/

  • by DoofusOfDeath on 12/27/19, 8:43 PM

    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.

  • by Mizza on 12/27/19, 8:07 PM

    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...

  • by ufmace on 12/27/19, 8:44 PM

    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?

  • by wallacoloo on 12/27/19, 7:46 PM

    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.

  • by _bxg1 on 12/27/19, 9:36 PM

    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.

  • by mwattsun on 12/27/19, 8:35 PM

    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...

  • by l0b0 on 12/28/19, 1:53 AM

    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.

  • by gitgud on 12/26/19, 9:51 PM

    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!

  • by pathartl on 12/26/19, 10:39 PM

    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.

  • by berbec on 12/27/19, 7:46 PM

    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.

  • by jimbob45 on 12/27/19, 9:23 PM

    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

  • by indentit on 12/26/19, 10:00 PM

    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!)

  • by LinuxBender on 12/26/19, 4:56 PM

    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.

  • by wskemper on 12/27/19, 8:17 PM

    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 :(

  • by m_ke on 12/27/19, 10:24 PM

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

  • by indentit on 12/27/19, 9:07 PM

    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.

  • by krick on 12/27/19, 11:37 PM

    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

  • by eitland on 12/27/19, 9:08 PM

    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.)

  • by absorber on 12/27/19, 8:21 PM

    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.

  • by ldevs3b on 12/28/19, 12:19 PM

    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

    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

  • by m_ke on 12/27/19, 7:50 PM

    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.

  • by jszymborski on 12/27/19, 2:32 AM

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

  • by newhotelowner on 12/27/19, 9:07 PM

    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.

  • by xpasky on 12/27/19, 8:29 PM

    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.

  • by thexa4 on 12/26/19, 5:17 PM

    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.

  • by tony on 12/28/19, 1:13 AM

    - 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.

    - 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...)

    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/)

    - 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

  • by bobosha on 12/28/19, 4:11 AM

    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.

  • by ralphc on 12/28/19, 1:11 AM

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

  • by billconan on 12/26/19, 11:57 PM

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

  • by abetusk on 12/27/19, 11:11 PM

    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/

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

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

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

    [5] https://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaign/3Dscanner/overview.html?j...

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

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

  • by mikewarot on 12/28/19, 5:09 AM

    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.

  • by notacoward on 12/27/19, 7:42 PM

    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.

  • by based2 on 12/26/19, 4:26 PM

  • by Kye on 12/30/19, 1:48 PM

    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.

  • by qualqual on 12/27/19, 9:39 PM

    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).

  • by hashworks on 12/28/19, 12:35 AM

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

  • by ziotom78 on 12/28/19, 5:41 AM

    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.

  • by georgewsinger on 12/27/19, 7:45 PM

    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.

  • by based2 on 12/27/19, 10:26 PM

    A real alternative to Outlook/Exchange/Active Directory.

  • by tmaly on 12/27/19, 8:30 PM

    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.

  • by aaron695 on 12/28/19, 12:36 AM

    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.

  • by znpy on 12/27/19, 8:48 PM

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

  • by sehugg on 12/27/19, 10:51 PM

    FPGA tools, with few exceptions (IceStorm, SymbiFlow)

  • by krilly on 12/27/19, 10:37 PM

    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.

  • by Bostonian on 12/26/19, 4:40 PM

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

  • by rpastuszak on 12/27/19, 9:39 PM

    Sketch, Figma

  • by bananapear on 12/29/19, 12:20 PM

    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.

  • by caspervonb on 12/28/19, 12:14 PM

    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.

  • by zzo38computer on 12/28/19, 6:21 PM

    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.

  • by vaibhavsagar on 12/27/19, 9:47 PM

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

  • by butz on 12/27/19, 9:16 PM

    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.

  • by _bxg1 on 12/27/19, 9:29 PM

    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.

  • by tpfour on 12/28/19, 12:44 AM

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

  • by lightedman on 12/28/19, 1:09 AM

    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.

  • by gary__ on 12/26/19, 9:25 PM

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

  • by anotheryou on 12/27/19, 9:52 PM

    - pdf editor

  • by ken on 12/27/19, 8:09 PM

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

  • by atemerev on 12/27/19, 11:05 PM

    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.

  • by starpilot on 12/27/19, 8:19 PM

    SAP, other annoying enterprise software.

  • by jdsalaro on 12/28/19, 8:52 AM

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

  • by bori5 on 12/27/19, 9:56 PM

    Simulink

  • by whalesalad on 12/28/19, 7:03 AM

    Microsoft Active Directory

  • by memn0nis on 12/30/19, 4:29 PM

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

  • by smbullet on 12/28/19, 12:34 AM

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

  • by o-__-o on 12/27/19, 4:04 AM

    Cisco Cloudcenter.

  • by wideasleep1 on 12/28/19, 2:28 AM

    Google Cloud Messenger/Firebase.

  • by realcr on 12/27/19, 8:41 PM

    A decent wysiwyg website builder.

  • by jeena on 12/27/19, 10:59 PM

    Confluence, Jira, Photoshop

  • by dt3ft on 12/26/19, 9:27 PM

    Octopus Deploy

  • by lanius on 12/27/19, 9:30 PM

    foobar2000 (media player for Windows)

  • by codingslave on 12/28/19, 12:05 AM

    Google search

  • by nomy99 on 12/27/19, 7:43 PM

    sketch

  • by dominotw on 12/29/19, 4:22 PM

    airtable

    splunk

  • by creimers on 12/27/19, 10:42 PM

    airtable

  • by metah on 12/27/19, 10:17 PM

    VLC

  • by funviolence on 12/27/19, 4:14 AM

    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

  • by villasv on 12/27/19, 8:56 PM

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

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

  • by alexfromapex on 12/27/19, 10:41 PM

    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.