I'd argue, and think GIMP is a good example, that products can fight off open source alternative adoption by being free to certain groups.

Piracy, student discounts, shareware, limited trials.

You could still consider this a win for open source, as it stops market abuse and restricts those paying to the people who depend on the software for business reasons and who haven't had their trust sufficiently broken that they switch over to open source to prevent abuse (which is the story in infrastructure, you're basically a sharecropper if you're building on non-open source infra).

I respectfully disagree; I think GIMP is a great example of an open source alternative that is both markedly worse than the corresponding commercial product, and yet good enough to inhibit the creation of new open source projects that would otherwise jeopardise the market share of that commercial product.

If I were an engineer at Adobe, and I was asked to make an open source project that would in no way endanger Photoshop - a product no serious Photoshop pro could ever figure out or be satisfied with - I'd give you something very much like GIMP. The fact that open source devs are generally content with GIMP is fantastic (for Adobe): it reduces the risk they'll create something actually competitive among artists and designers. Plus, Adobe gets to point to the GIMP if they're ever accused of monopolistic or anti-competitive behaviour.

I used Photoshop for 8 years, including for web development, before switching to Gimp.

Gimp is good enough for everything one needs in web dev, is free, and has a vital feature Photoshop lacks: the ability to run on a Linux workstation. When developing software intended for Linux servers the value of having a Linux workstation to easily do local development cannot be understated.

> I used Photoshop for 8 years, including for web development, before switching to Gimp.

> Gimp is good enough for everything one needs in web dev, is free, and has a vital feature Photoshop lacks: the ability to run on a Linux workstation. When developing software intended for Linux servers the value of having a Linux workstation to easily do local development cannot be understated.

Precisely. You're a dev for whom GIMP is "good enough". If you were dissatisfied you might make a new tool, but since GIMP suffices, you happily use it and see no reason for anything else.

Meanwhile, artists and designers who work in Photoshop day in and day out - the people comprising the bulk of Photoshop's actual market - overwhelmingly reject GIMP, and they don't generally have the capability to make a new tool, so they stick with Adobe.

At the risk of making an imperfect analogy, imagine you wrote a French textbook. French teachers overwhelmingly rejected your textbook and didn't use it in their classrooms. But at the same time, other language professionals sometimes found it helpful for small things like double checking the conjugation of some obscure verb, and they'd defend it because they found it useful. Is your French textbook a success? I'd say no. I'd say you're not only failing your primary market, but you're lulling fellow professionals into a false sense that there's sufficient tools out there for that market, which is doubly harmful.

> Meanwhile, artists and designers who work in Photoshop day in and day out - the people comprising the bulk of Photoshop's actual market - overwhelmingly reject GIMP, and they don't generally have the capability to make a new tool, so they stick with Adobe.

That's because Photoshop was early and is an industry standard, so you're going to have to learn it anyway. There's no incentive to learn GIMP because it's not going to cut you out of a job, and there's no incentive to move your shop to GIMP because all it's going to do is eliminate the massive bulk of the labor pool that is unfamiliar with it.

Also, if you do print, the color situation in GIMP is not good.

But the self-congratulation here is silly. The market chose Photoshop because it was the only choice. The market didn't place it in its position, it largely began the market. The reason people choose to use it is because they are choosing to eat, not because they think it's better.

People who think it's intuitive or straightforward are very different to me. The GIMPs feature organization is far superior to PS imo, it's just lacking a couple of very large features that require being woven throughout the implementations of everything in the data model, like proper color management and live filtering. That's to be expected from the nature of the project, because stuff like that would normally be focused on by a team that would consult with every other team to keep systems like that consistent and debugged. Free software has to rely on individual developers to get inspired to create a system themselves, completely married to the current design, that bolts what they're doing to every component. It's hard.

But when we get it, no one can take it away from us. They could start charging by the minute to use Photoshop tomorrow.

Photoshop runs fine on Linux. I pay for it and use it in Wine. Gimp is hot trash and to add insult to injury it's responsible for birthing Gtk; it's a fool me once fool me twice thing.

What is this mutually shared meme-delusion that Gimp is anywhere close to an adequate facsimile of Photoshop?

> What is this mutually shared meme-delusion that Gimp is anywhere close to an adequate facsimile of Photoshop?

It’s not a facsimile of Photoshop but it serves the same purpose.

In my experience the people who come to GIMP expecting it to work exactly like Photoshop are the ones who are disappointed, because it’s not Photoshop. But if you use it and don’t expect to already know how to use it because you know Photoshop, it’s fine.

Precisely. "It's fine" is the problem. It doesn't need to be fine, it needs to compete with Photoshop to be a serious tool in the space it serves. And what the vast, vast majority of artists have said is that it is insufficient for that.

Can you crop a photo in it? Sure, once you figure out the placement of things.

Can you perform serious photo manipulation? Somewhat, although Photoshop takes way less cognitive cost (so more people can be more productive).

Economics of attention are important.

> Somewhat, although Photoshop takes way less cognitive cost

Does it take less cognitive cost because it’s actually easier, or because you’re used to it and you’re not used to GIMP?

To be frank, I'm a regular GIMP user and have only dabbled in Photoshop. However, I empathize with daily drivers of the software.

To address you're question: elements of both.

As a paid service, Photoshop can afford to have developer research users and improve UX. GIMP, as an open source project, is subject to the (often well-placed) whims of its developers, which does not have the same profit motive to keep users as Photoshop.

This in of itself does not guarantee less cognitive load. But certainly it is easier for a GIMP user to adopt Photoshop than it does for a Photoshop user to adopt GIMP.

Further, we could argue the status quo is as it is because GIMP is less productive than Photoshop by at least whatever Photoshop charges per month (and possibly more).

Photoshop is garbage with a randomized interface that is also trying to sell you things. People think it's intuitive because it's the industry standard and stockholm syndrome. GIMP is bad (but improving) on print color, and on non-destructive filters and layers.

The hyperbolic invective hurled at GIMP by Photoshop users is astounding. I often spend all day in Photoshop and Illustrator doing preprint and it makes me want to burn Adobe to the ground every day. I would gladly never look at PS again if GIMP got color right.

>an adequate facsimile of Photoshop

For some it apparently is. There are certainly talented designers/artists who really want an open source stack who can produce excellent results using GIMP. Would I encourage using GIMP if someone doesn't care about open source? Almost certainly not, but it can be used to produce excellent results.

I wholeheartedly disagree with the sentiment in your comment. Just because you, or a certain group of people don't like it, doesn't mean it's a bad tool. It may not serve for everyone, but for those for which it does, it works, and it does so well. Also, acting like photoshop is the be-all end-all of photo editing pushes the idea that you must be just like photoshop to even compete, which is actively harmful as it prevents people from innovating, and puts pressure on anyone thinking of even attempting such a daunting task.

Furthermore, even if I were to agree, your argument completely falls apart with the existence of Krita. Writing software like this is hard and time-consuming, which is the primary reason we haven't seen more projects of this scale, as there's been various smaller-scale tools over the years, like Pinta.

I appreciate your thoughts. I do suspect that I speak for the majority of artists and designers on this one, based on the conversations I've had with them on this and the very low popularity of GIMP in those worlds. (I'm coming from a game dev angle, for context, so I interact with artists fairly regularly. I'm also married to one!) But I certainly appreciate that GIMP may be useful for you, and I wouldn't wish to deny you use of that tool.

I love Krita; it's my graphics suite of choice for many tasks. But I can't help but think that if GIMP hadn't been so resistant to input from artists and designers, Krita wouldn't need to exist at all. It is a tool born of the lucky fact that someone wasn't satisfied with GIMP and had the technical skills to do something about it.

With respect to your comment about innovation, I'd be more inclined to agree if, y'know, GIMP had actually done any of that. GIMP is not innovative, nor competitive, and is unable to facilitate even fairly basic tasks for contemporary artists and designers like working with CMYK images. The existence of "good-enough" GIMP is a hindrance to innovation in this space.

"if GIMP hadn't been so resistant to input from artists and designers, Krita wouldn't need to exist at all"

Thats not far off at all actually.

...and I guess I should add, I still use Krita as a result of the continued overall baffle-crash of GIMPs UI and general behavior, regardless of the fact that GIMP does have a great feature-set in the abstract.

Your second sentence doesn’t make sense because their post presented a lot of good points that move the argument past a “I don’t like it so it’s bad” argument. To knock it up another notch those same points could be applied to Linux over Windows. Market (user) adoption is the only real metric to measure against. The argument I submit is that a tool like Gimp can’t be considered better if it can’t claim the market to prove it, if it was fundamentally better at its core adoption would pass the non open source leader.

There couldn't be a wrose metric for quality than market share, because it involves many different aspects of marketing and social dynamics, as well as the context of the time in which it was created. You don't need to look further than Internet Explorer for this, or in the programming world, JavaScript. Also the parent comment didn't present any points.

That is not a win for open source because reducing payments is not a goal of open source. Assured continuation of availability and ownership of user's data is the explicit goal of the FOSS movement as stated by RMS. That means that it will continue to run on your hardware, and won't lock your data, and you can fix the bugs and suit it to your purpose.

Money was never the issue.

RMS is on record as supporting BSD style licences for certain things because without them, proprietary software would have an even stronger stranglehold.

https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3

So it's not totally black and white, there's tactics and strategy involved. The less money going to Adobe, the less power and control they have. If they can force you to pay, they can force you to do other things. If they can't force you to pay, then they can't force other things as well.

The corollary is that FOSS-induced e.g. "student versions" of Adobe software entrench vendor lockin, as the students learn only Adobe software.

Richard Stallman’s personal philosophy does not define the goals of open source. There are many different people contributing to it for many different reasons, and yes, having free (as in non-paid) alternatives to proprietary software is one of the most prominent ones.

> Richard Stallman’s personal philosophy does not define the goals of open source.

Richard Stallman has nothing do do with open source, and Free software was defined as Richard Stallman's personal philosophy, take it or leave it. He hasn't changed it.

I'm a complete free software advocate, but definitely only for Stallman's reasons. I have no urge to give free things to computer programmers. If I'm going to give away free stuff, I'll give to the poor. I don't have any special sympathy towards the needy computer programmer just because they share my hobby/vocation.

Plenty of people say “free software” or FOSS without meaning RMS’s version of it, however popular his may be.

The key example for this is BitKeeper. They signed their own death warrant by ceasing to provide free licenses to open source developers. Unfortunately, one of the projects using it was Linux. Linus was forced to write git and the rest is history

Wasn't that Perforce?

No, it was bitkeeper: https://lwn.net/Articles/131657/

The only thing that held back adoption of GIMP is its perpetually horrible UX.

No, it’s really not (unless you mean the literal, holistic user experience and not what the term usually refers to). GIMP is lacking the tools and integrations that make Photoshop seem like magic, while not being more performant or offering much of a benefit beyond being OSS. The lackluster UI is just the cherry on top.

This is also why Google sucks at so many things, despite having the best offering on paper. GCP is honestly great, but a terrible product. Stadia? Zillion chat apps? Google Inbox by Gmail by Google? Google wallet pay Android pay wallet? They all work great and would be best in class if they were decent products and you could figure out how to get them to work at all.

It feels like someone with great ideas started working on Gmail and quit before it was finished. Whatever they are doing to organize emails in a "smart" way is super confusing. I kind of get it but it just doesn't work. They should either finish it or just revert back to organizing emails by date of arrival.

Paul Buchheit was core developer of gmail , who left gmail in 2006 - where its become shitty afterwards. He founded friendfeed and then got acquired by Facebook - and he left facebook to become angel investor / he is also main Partner of YC . he invested in many great startups like Twitch . On the opensource part , he build tornado web framework which is really important async framework for python ecosystem. Jupyter is built on top of tornado . He is active in HackerNews .

Gmail quality dropped off a cliff all of a sudden. In particular, many many emails get sent to spam now, including emails sent by Google itself! Notifications about calendar invites regularly get sent to spam at inconvenient times.

I can't tell if this is just some sort of temporary spam filter tweaking error and oversight or an emergent property of a content-based filtering system that they won't revert.

Funny, I have the opposite problem, which could actually explain your problem.

I never used to get spam through GMail's filters, but in the last six-ish months I now get a couple every day. They're almost always the same format, too - frequently just a link, and often coming from an outlook.com email address.

So a possible hypothesis is that spammers got good at evading GMail's filter, so in tweaking it to catch these new spam techniques they could be causing more false positives.

I have observed the same thing. I _never_ saw a single spam message in years. Suddenly I am seeing strikingly obvious ones at the same frequency you are. This must be on Google's plate to fix. Surely they see it.

Would fixing it improve their ad business?

I'm still surprised by how often people (not necessarily you!) forget about misaligned purposes: your purpose for using Gmail is to have a good email service; Google's purpose for running Gmail is to make money, _not_ necessarily by providing a good email service.

When purposes misalign like that, you get users bewildered about why such a competent company would be “incapable” of providing a less crappy service.

Compare with Thunderbird: they make money to pay the bills but no-one's getting rich. Their only way of getting money is by building a good email client — by building features that companies will pay them to build; or by making a general-purpose email client good enough that users will donate.

(I know Thunderbird is not directly equivalent because it's just a client, not an email server, but the email client part is comparable.)

Ideas from the gmail ads team regularly get shot down by product because it would make gmail suck too much and piss everyone off.

I feel pretty bad for the ads team honestly. Like, their job is to basically just ruin products. Literally no one likes anything they do, ever. Their justification for everything is always just "You have to let us do this because $$$" and no one respects that, even though everyone knows that it's how the world works.

Not just google specifically, but making a product better is good for business. Eg making gmail better means more gmail users who log in more often and see more ads.

Practically speaking, most big (tech) companies probably have split teams for UI/Product and Ads. So there’s most likely a team of product managers and engineers at G who’s entire job is to make Gmail better - regardless of the ad team in the next building over. So those people literally don’t care about making G money per se, as long as they’re not introducing bugs into the ad showing logic or making it worse (see first point).

So interestingly I think "better spam detection" has a relatively straightforward interface (e.g. connect this app to Gmail's servers via SMTP, move emails between folders), but I assume you need almost Google-scale (or at least more than startup-scale) metadata and spam report collection to be able to do half as well.

One of the rare areas where barrier to innovation isn't market access but actually product quality. That being said I wouldn't pay a lot for this as a standalone service, though I would definitely pay for a standalone email client at this point.

  > Surely they see it.

Do you use the Report Spam button? Because that is how they see it.

Every damn time. But until the issue is resolved, I will assume that button is just a NOP designed to make people feel good.

I use Thunderbird. Does gmail take notice of me moving messages to the spam folder?

(Question not directed at you specifically.)

As a Thunderbird user too,I would love to know the answer as well.

I’ve been getting lots of extra spam and it particularly seems like anything with “invoice” in the text won’t get sent to spam.

Funny, I have neither. But think your analysis makes sense too and I just got lucky.

When?

It always amuses me that we try to complicate things that should just be a simple list ordered by date.

I switched to basic HTML gmail the moment it tried to predict what I wanted to type (incorrectly, I should add).

I sometimes accidentally open the 'modern' view and it feels so bloated. Everything is so against intuition, it feels like someone's fresh-out-of-marketing-school design.

> just revert back to organizing emails by date of arrival

You can choose to do that: Settings / General / Conversation view off

It's so much better to simply have emails in the order they arrive instead of hunting them down in "conversations".

I understand that emails can get buried but threaded views are so much better for me (especially at work) than my inbox being buried by conversations/threads that I have zero interest in. My alternative would probably be to more aggressively filter but that would effectively mean I never even saw lots of things I might actually care about.

I switched to basic HTML gmail the moment it tried to predict what I wanted to type (often incorrectly, which worsened my experience)

I sometimes accidentally open the 'modern' view and it feels so bloated. Everything is so against intuition, it feels like someone's fresh-out-of-marketing-school design.

I was trying to find sent mail and only way I found it was by searching mail where I was the sender.

Smart but not obvious.

You’re cherry-picking examples. Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and Chrome are extraordinarily successful products.

Depending on one’s point, it can be argued that listing Google’s successful products is the cherry-picking: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Why would you argue? Selecting only the successes is the literal definition of cherry-picking. I'd say that every one of those cherries is very arguable, though, especially if one's definition of successful has any relation to being profitable.

True, although I feel like none of those products have made positive product-oriented changes in many years now. Gmail at least is spiraling down the product toilet, which makes me really sad.

Being such succesful products, all of these taken together probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad business...

> Being such succesful products, all of these taken together probably generate sufficient income to cover Google's Ad business...

Assuming this post is sarcasm, Are we really going to criticise Google Search for not being profitable?

Google has an ad business because of these products, not seperate to them.

Google doesn't have an ad-business, it is an ad-business.

You can't separate Google from its ad business. All of their major products exist in service of the ad business, search, inbox, even Chrome. If the services don't exist to help build a profile of you, they exist to help build a profile of web traffic and detect ad-fraud, or to simply shape the landscape into one that isn't hostile to google's ads.

I'd say that Google has these products (really, services) because of its ad business, not the other way round.

Someone more familiar with Google's oeuvre can probably answer this: all those well-liked services that Google unceremoniously cancelled — were they the ones that didn't help (or harmed) Google's ad business?

Dont forget Goog literally owened the anti spam industry with gmail after their integrating POSTINI purchase in like ~~2006

And now in 2022 any gmailinbox is fn full of spam...

Because you have to support products, esp. antispam, while goog is generaly known for doing the other thing.

Uh, they literally paid MILLIONS for the antispam company POSTINI and thats what the original anti-spam features for GMAIL are based on... in the last 18 months or something, google apparently deleted that tech from their stack, I posted about this when I first started having so much spam inbox my gmail....

So yeah - THEY _supported_ the product by paying millions for it...

Then they did "the other thing"

Why is GCP bad?

Personally I'm real suspicious from the time I was on a project using AppEngine, we got sandwiched between Google deciding "1 year" was an appropriate time to declare AppEngine v1 deprecated, but AppEngine v2 was still in "beta" and was removing a bunch of APIs we depended on, while basically saying "oh yeah, setup something completely different if you want something like this" (appengine datastore or whatever vs. "it's gone, um, redis maybe?")

So we were stuck with a product which we were writing against something that the official word was would no longer be supported by the time we launched, while being told to develop against the platform which is "beta" and they don't want to commit to supporting the feature set of - and which plain couldn't be used yet at the time they told us this.

This is just a ridiculous way to run a commercial platform offering (aka: why I always tell people to use boring VMs for as long as possible).

> (aka: why I always tell people to use boring VMs for as long as possible).

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Take whatever nice features you can “for free” as tech debt, and if that api inevitably disappears… push it down the stack and own a bit more of it.

If you have to build everything from first principles it’ll take way longer to get going.

I think the usual retort is that at any moment and for any inexplicable reason your entire infrastructure can be deleted for some reason you barely know let alone comprehend. This seems to be the case for apps at least.

I neither support nor deny this belief but it's an increasingly common impression.

GCP tends to be designed for customers that are staffed with mostly Google engineers.

Source? This comment seems absurd, at best. I am no 'google engineer' (is that supposed to be a bad thing?) and I've been using and loving GCP for well over a decade. Built several extremely successful businesses on it.

What they're saying is that Google is opinionated. They determine that their way is the right way and you will do it their way. As opposed to Microsoft and Amazon, who both ask their customers, "how do you want to solve this problem?" and then build what the customers want.

If the way Google has decided you should build something happens to work for you, great, but for most people, they want a product built around how they like to operate, not get told how to do it.

I work in Google and think I can share: in fact we do ask our users a lot. To the point that I would be very surprised if any major development in GCP is allowed at all without extensive focus groups, or coming out of cooperation with some major customer.

Maybe lately, but certainly not at first. I was one of those early customers, and when I would say, "We want to do it like this", they would say, "Well we think this is how it should be done" and then ignore me. So yeah, they talked to customers, and just told them they were wrong.

But also Google has a trust issue. I think GCP makes a superior product, but I would never use it. I'd be afraid that one of my former employees leaves the company, does something Google doesn't like, and they shut down my entire GCP account because my gmail is associated with the gmail of someone who did something bad, even though they don't work for me anymore. (Yes, this is a real thing that happened)

I can't trust Google not to just shut down my account and then give me no human to talk to to get it fixed.

Just because they disagreed with you doesn't mean they are bad.

> I think GCP makes a superior product

Exactly. They do.

The rest is mostly just conjecture. The loudest wheels get the most notice... there are plenty of other people, like myself, who have been using GCP for a long time without any drama. It just works.

I think that early days they were more opinionated. The design of the datastore is extremely google centric scale. Exposing it to end users was a matter of just "learn to use it, or not".

AppEngine had a lot of limitations, like the version of Java you could use, because they had to basically hack at the JVM to get it secure enough.

These days though, things like Cloud Functions, are effectively just simple containers and http endpoints. I could move them off to another provider with a days work.

This "well over a decade" claim needs some qualification. GCP only became gevnerally available in Nov 2011. Before that, there was App Engine and Cloud Storage, but not GCP.

I jumped onto AppEngine as soon as I saw it announced (probably here on HN). Probably sometime around late 2009.

Quickly convinced my friend Jeff to get onto it... we saw a need for a datastore wrapper and he (and I a tiny bit) wrote Objectify, which is one of the most widely used tools for AppEngine out there.

Look at the license.txt... Feb 6, 2010, 13 years old...

https://github.com/objectify/objectify

Do you mean they should have said instead "within 9 months after GCP became generally available" to be more precise in their statement?

I suspect that if at some point you had an issue with it you would've been frustrated as hell by your inability to do anything about it and would've sworn them off forever. But you were the survivor that didn't have issues and can't seem to comprehend that as a business it is absurd to rely on a company that can kill you off without reason or recourse because you were the unlucky one that pissed off the algorithm.

You're right, it is FUD, but it's not malicious FUD spread by us to spite google, it is actually rational FUD based on real reports that is entirely google's fault

Shrug, seems like an inherent risk with any SaaS provider. I worked for a large porn company and a web analytics product, we were one of the largest customers of, got sold to a Mormon company. Our account was terminated.

I guess I'm lucky that I haven't pissed off the GCP algo yet.

>> seems like an inherent risk with any SaaS provider.

If you see risk as binary, then yes there is risk in any SaaS provider, or indeed any part of your company supply chain. Risk though is not binary, it is measured on a scale of 0 to 1.

There is risk every time you get in a car. But some cars are safer than others. Some are renowned for putting safety first.

The vast majority of people survived their Ford Pinto, no doubt some loved it, but the perceived risk of driving it (rightly or wrongly) was higher than say a Volvo.

Google is the Pinto of SaaS. Whatever the actual risks are, they are perceived as being higher risk than other SaaS providers. Thanks to their "no support" policy, the penalty for failure is total extinction. With most SaaS businesses there are humans in the loop who can make human decisions.

> Google is the Pinto of SaaS

That's some strong personal opinion... source?

GCP has been extremely performant and reliable for me across several different companies.

I'm not saying that people have definitely run into issues, which we've all read about here on HN, but this sounds more like squeaky wheel than the norm.

> Thanks to their "no support" policy,

Their support has been excellent, when I've needed it, which is rare, since it has just worked for me very well for a decade now. Their documentation is also pretty well done too. Just like with any sort of SaaS solution, you should be building a relationship with an account exec.

I've had CloudFlare start to put in weird restrictions on my account once I hit a certain size. It showed up with requests being oddly denied and zero notification. I contacted my account manager (called their cell phone!) and the problem was resolved in a few hours. I don't even pay for a business plan, but I did make sure to develop a friendly relationship with them when they originally reached out to me.

>> That's some strong personal opinion... source?

It's absolutely personal perception. Ford made a couple millions Pintos, I never had one, much less saw one explode in a fireball, but I'm not rushing out to buy one either.

My perception is borne from a long history of reading stories here. Over time they create a perception in me that Google regularly drops products, changes APIs, changes pricing, closes accounts, withholds earnings and so on.

I'm sure millions of people happily use their services. However my perception of risk with Google is high, so as a result I don't use any (paid) Google services and I take my business elsewhere. Obviously I use Google search, and watch YouTube, but I'm happy to not put Google in my supply-chain, nor rely on them for revenue.

Now maybe it's just bad PR. Maybe Google has real lower risk than say someone else. Maybe Pintos were statistically safer than a Volvo. But perception is everything, and my perception is that, given a choice, I'm not going to use GCP.

IME this perception is based on customers using the self service/cc versions of the service.

If what you are doing is important get a sales rep and invoice billing. This is actually tru of any service, but Google is particularly bad. You don't want to be caught up in their automated fight against fraud and abuse

Father lost his Gmail account and his Google Fi account. [0] Which means that he was locked out of a lot of other accounts because he couldn't access his email or SMS messages.

I figure Google knows how to protect against attacks way better than a random email provider. I enrolled in their Advanced Protection Program [1] because I don't want my email taken over. I've used a Google Voice number deliberately because somebody can't walk into Verizon or AT&T and get my number.

The idea that there's absolutely no recourse if Google decides I'm a bad guy. Especially since they sometimes seem to target associated accounts - are all of the family accounts going to be cancelled, too?

I don't think Apple's security is as good but I'm also not qualified to judge that. And at least I can talk to support on the phone or go into a store. So I'm moving my email that way over time.

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs... [1]https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/

The thread is about GCP, not about the rest of the Google products.

For me it's partially because the interface is insanely slow and painful to use. Maybe this is a "I'm in Australia" problem but it feels like I'm wading through mud to perform the most basic tasks.

>open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure. (and pretty good at infrastructure products).

Oh This is Great. Thank You. Will have to bookmark your comment. Perfectly describe something I have in my mind but couldn't quite put it into precise wordings.

Open Source works, and its desired in infrastructure because everyone relies on them. And its common interest align with everyone.

If we look at the all the success we have in Open Source, most of them are not even on the list. SQLite, MySQL / Postgres, all the Networking Libraries, WebKit / Blink, FFmpeg, GNU Compiler / LLVM, Apache / Nginx etc, etc. Not only are they the dominant position or with substantial market share, they are also all infrastructure related.

It's because open-source favors "those who show up and code" (I recall a blog post about the Apache Foundation saying that was what they valued). If you can't code, but you can make UI/UX suggestions, or come up with a way to productize the raw codebase, you're usually ignored or (worse) mistaken for a coder and people ask you when you'll have a PR ready.

Infrastructure has a bit of a tragedy of the commons thing going on. No one wants to pay for everyone else's infrastructure.

So any software project that is infrastructure tends to suffer from lack of funding, whether it be proprietary software or open source.

There are exceptions, naturally. E.g., PostgreSQL and SQLite, and Linux. To overcome the tragedy of the commons you need tons of interest and community. Everyone who contributes has to feel like they're getting their money's worth and that there's no better way. I.e., mindshare matters. Mindshare matters whether the thing is open source or proprietary.

Is there any place there are actual statistics on this. Say the top 10k most used open source projects across languages where each project has the amount of money spent to maintain it / the number of people hours needed to maintain it and where the maintainers care to be remunerated?

I really don't know which open source projects are under funded. Firefox, Python, LLVM, Clang, .NET, Chromium, Electron, VSCode are certainly adequately funded. There are also projects like some of my own that have a few 100 or 1000 users but I don't need/want funding for them. Maybe if they got 10k or 100k users and I actually got lots of support requests that would change.

I'm sure there are several under funded projects but it'd be nice to see some qualitative data instead of just feeling it must be true.

> For example, adoption of GIMP has not likely materially increased over time (as a relative percent of total addressable market)

This is an interesting question to me because Adobe only recently moved to cloud/subscription fairly recently. Before that, you could get a physical copy of Photoshop and keep it running forever.

As that pathway fades, it will be interesting to see if something will finally supplant Photoshop.

I would not call 9 years ago "recently" (March 2013 is when Adobe announced it would no longer sell boxed copies of the Creative Suite software).

Adobe obviously doesn't care. They treat their customers like crap and actively try to extract as much money out of them as possible. A few years ago (or less) they worded their description of their monthly subscription very carefully, so as to mislead people into thinking they could pay for a month or two when they needed it, and then cancel. The fact was that monthly only allowed you to pay each month, it was still an annual subscription which could not be cancelled without substantial early termination penalty (basically paying the whole remainder of the year if my memory serves me correctly). If they really cared about their customers, they would have made that very clear when you signed up for service. I helped a family member sign up, and there was no explanation, and no warning about cancellation.

I wasn't thrilled about the subscription model in the first place, but this family member needed access to the tool. After the way that went down, I have no intention of doing business with Adobe ever again. I know a lot of other people who feel the same way.

(edited to fix a typo)

> They treat their customers like crap

I'm not a fan of Adobe's payment practices. But they do treat us well in one regard. They give us one thing that we can't get anywhere else. The best photo editing software on the market.

Their products havent changed in like a decade. Its actually getting worse, slower and buggier.

Its best photo editing software because people are so used to it its hard to move and everybody new has to learn it because its industry standard.

But photo editing is not some arcane magic like it was in 90s. Freaking photopea.com does what photoshop does often much faster in browser. Not to mention million other affinity/pixelmator/acorn native apps.

Yes. Affinity Photo and Design most likely.

GIMP is just awful. It's worse than any of the commercial Mac paint programs including Pixelmator, acorn, etc.

GIMP is supposed to be a Photoshop alternative? But is missing so many features which don’t even seem that hard to code? I always thought it was supposed to be some weird middle ground between Paint and Photoshop.

For years, I've looked to GIMP as an alternative to Photoshop but now I've given up the idea. Yes, it's missing many features but my main reason for dropping it is its perverse operation, it's just too awkward and clumsy to use.

I can only conclude the reason that these inherent problems with GIMP have remained uncorrected for so long is that its developers couldn't give a damn whether we use it or not.

It seems only a play toy for its cliquey developers and the only reason it's available at all is that we gullible users act as occasional bug detectors.

Sure, open software has resoure problems hence expected delays but too much water has flowed under the bridge for that now to be a viable excuse.

I forgot to add the last straw for me was the removal of GIMP's 'Fade' feature. I'm aware of the alterative but it's not as convenient.

User ergonomics in software is extremely important and its removal is a big anti-feature. At the time GIMP's developers didn't offer an apology, they just said that's the way it's going to be on 'technical grounds'.

What did you drop it in favor of?

Paint.NET, Inkscape, Krita, CinePaint, ImageMagick (command line - yes, it can be very useful at times), and various others when certain needs dictate.

Also, Photoshop CS3 which is my last paid version (moreover, I can still reinstall it as Adobe temporarily released a general version with an unlocked key when it abolished the CS3 licensing server some years ago).

I even use IrfanView viewer as it has a nice batch converter (although it's no good for 48-bit work).

Frankly, there's no shortage of image editors even after eliminating GIMP and Photoshop.

I think if you want to do digital art, you use Krita, not Gimp.

Yes, and Blender. Both examples where productization is better. Likely marketing and community building around the software is much better too.

Hasn't it been a full decade since the last perpetually licensed Photoshop?

I guess five years ago you could still easily use a five year old pirated photoshop?

We have a legit PS install on my wife’s machine and it’s preventing us from making a move to another computer for her. She’s a casual/non-professional user. She knows the app and how to use it. We aren’t interested in renting the app… basically we’re holding out on that machine, but sooner or later it’s going to become a security risk in our network.

At some point it might be worth looking into Affinity Photo, it's a $55 (one-time, with free updates) cross-platform photo manipulation program with surprising feature parity with Photoshop.

This is why I still use Photoshop CS3. It's the newest version Adobe have released as an activation-free offline installer, and it does everything I need and then some.

Couldn't you run it in a VM?

Likely not, because the installation is linked to the Windows or macOS installation.

In the case of Windows, the machine can be eventually upgraded, one part at a time, into something more powerful.

Engineers continually discount the importance of usability.

The easy applications to convert to open source are those that the developer of the application is the user of the application. The easiest example is Bitkeeper to GIT conversion. The person who wrote GIT is the same person who used Bitkeeper. Therefore he knew what would be usable for a developer.

GIMP vs Blender is the counter example. Both GIMP and Blender are targeted at artists and not developers. The author assumes the awesomeness of Blender is inevitable. But GIMP is pretty bad and shows no evidence that it is getting better. Yet - when major animation studios decided to adopt Blender they dedicated UX resources to Blender to make it more usable for artists.

When the developer is not the user, you need that extra step.

> Engineers continually discount the importance of usability.

The real issue, unfortunately, is worse: It's a lack of empathy for the user.

Usability need no explaining to an engineer. You have your 500$ mechanical keyboard. You your carefully crafted .vscode and you lust for that e-ink monitor.

Unfortunately, you don't understand that you are different to the average user of the thing you are working on and in that thing you are working on, your job is to serve the user.

To be fair, this is not a struggle unique to engineers, far from it. Professions, that is very adamant about conveying this during training are teachers, therapists (and I explicitly don't include physicians, although they can be) and, to a wildly varying degree because of what the job means nowadays, designers.

People working in most other professions default suck at this.

This is also true. I get into arguments all the time with people who start by saying "Oh it's easy" and then after I prove that it's hard, say "I don't care that it's hard for other people". It's just a sort of blindness for your internal shortcutting of "I don't care that it's hard for others, it's easy for me" to "It's easy to everyone that matters" to "It's easy for everyone".

I have this hunch you could break into product management by product managing open source projects. You'd certainly learn some good skills if you could do it. It would be pure influence over authority.

I'd be somewhat skeptical of anyone trying to product manage an open source project, and I think unless you were a truly exceptional product manager, most contributors would perceive your contribution as net negative if you tried that. The point of open source is people work on the things they want to work on (for the most part, obvious exceptions apply) and via a Darwinian process, what survives is the result of the best ideas of the people who stick it out.

Open source contributions I've made have been mostly because I need a certain feature or there's something that doesn't quite work right etc. Eg recently I took up qubes os. I like using the i3 window manager, and it had some problems on qubes, so I made some small contribution (I can't even remember what it was now) to fix that.

The normal PM process wouldn't work, but I think normal PM processes are broken anyway. It also wouldn't cover all the wonderful small features, ports and fixes people like you contribute.

Any notion of "setting priorities" would go right out the window. It would have to entirely be about giving gifts, which is what open source is based on, anyway.

"I talked to 5 of our users about this problem. Here's what they said in summary, with some pull quotes. Here's how 3 other libraries solve this problem. I added 2 more ideas, made a table comparing all of them. Here's the 1 I think is the best, if anyone wants to make it."

Then it gets picked up or not (probably not lol). But no "influencing" past that. The influencing is just doing useful research, idea generation, and sharing it.

if you can herd a cat, you can herd a sheep

They require different approaches.

The best way to herd cats is by a laser pointer: show a clear, shining goal, and you don't need to give more directions.

With sheep, you need to run circles around them and so drive their formidable grass-cutting capacity where you want it to be, slowly.

Nice analogy. I like that. For the laser you likely need to show an indicator for the distance to the bright red spot, and break it into measurable chunks (like a roadmap) to which actionable steps can be attached. Tbh a cat won't do anything with that, but to the feline breed of FOSS developers it may help to keep (and understand the importance of) product focus. Although you might just focus the bright spot on farther away objectives when the felines get closer to it, to refocus their attention.

Bright light in the distance works for me. A lot of the interest is in the path finding process - dead ends and cycles included. A bright light in the distance that someone else has broken into measurable chunks is totally unappealing.

Like JC said - you can shove your roadmaps where you like, many people contribute exactly because they're sick of roadmaps and product foci.

This sometimes might be true, but there are many counterexamples. If you look at the web content management systems, the market is dominated by well-engineered open source CMS products, e.g., Drupal, ez Publish, typo3... Even for webshops this true: presta shop, opencart, ...

It might seem like domination but its just the biggest field. The pie is huge, everybody needs CMS. So everybody eats and if you focus on one segment it might see like its domination.

I would say if anything every other website now is Webflow. Every shop is Shopify. And highest quality CMSes are commercial products like Craft CMS or Kirby CMS. So serious projects often grab those instead of OSS offerings.

Ok, there is for sure a closed source offering. Although, if you look at the data of the 1 millio top site on builtwith a strong oss share is clearly visible. It goes without saying that wordpress has the overall largest share, which technically might not be considered a fully-fledged CMS...

There‘s a large proprietary CMS market, mostly Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, EpiServer/Optimizely. There‘s also the more recently risen headless/SaaS content platforms such as Contentful, Sanity, Contentstack, etc. At the bottom end of the market you got Webflow, Wix, and Squarespace.

Wordpress and Drupal do compete but the market is not dominated by open source if you look at more than just the count of websites.

Similar things are true in commerce. Salesforce Commerce, SAP Commerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and commercetools are all not open source but very sizable businesses.

Firefox, VLC, Signal, chromium, codium, veracrypt, ublock origin, bitwarden, ubuntu...

None of these are counter-examples to what the OP said

> Not all, but the ones that aren't have clear product management of some sort.

That's effectively all of these except maybe ublock.

If you don't have someone trying to sell some portion of your code base, true community efforts not a commercial effort that happens to be OSS, you're probably an infrastructure project.

Firefox is made by a company. VLC has a product manager (who owns the VideoLAN Foundation).

Signal and chromium as well. I am not sure about Ubuntu, but to me it looks like they have a product/design org.

Blender would be another example. How are they run?

Blender is a foundation:

https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/

Interesting. So all of the examples have salaried design and product folks?

Meanwhile there's thousands of volunteering FOSS projects that are engineers only. Do product & design people not have passion projects? Or they do but are for some reason unable to collaborate with engineers (or vice versa)?

It's a complex problem. Design agencies and individual designers are blighted by the spectre of "spec work" [https://www.nospec.com] [https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1]. The tl;dr of it is that business will approach agencies and demand they work on a product for free, of a a cost lower than the wok is worth in an act of good faith for the promise of fully paid work in the future. Except the work rarely comes. The upshot is designers are taught the value of their worth at college/university.

The other problem is the FOSS community itself. See the concurrent post about GIMP [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32624055]. Opinionated devs that either don't see the value of design or having a designer. I know that this isn't true for all projects, but there a bad apples amongst the bigger, more well known projects (GNOME for example) that will spoil it for everyone else. Again, GIMP is a great example of this. As a result, most 'passion projects' lead to designers working on small projects that inspire them, which are rarely software related, ore they look to create something that can provide an income, either as a small second income or as a new business.

Canonical basically supports Ubuntu. (Over and above the Linux kernel and other components many of which are supported by many different companies (and individuals).

A CMS is infrastructure, it's business facing not user facing

I consider the content editors as end users of a CMS. The website visitor is not using the CMS.

You have a good point that we can start a discussion around but I think you're being overly negative and falling for survivor bias. E.g. Does the success of Photoshop mean proprietary product management is superior? Or does the death of Corel Draw mean it's doomed to failure? And Apple, everyone's favourite product company, has Pages and Numbers which are not better than OO (and Word's incumbency is vaguely illegal).

So let's put that, and FOSS dominance in browsers and IDEs and databases and programming languages and media players to the side.

FOSS could do with better product management: what would it look like? More roadmaps? More figma/inkscape mockups? More user interviews?

> de-facto market-leader, they are mostly infrastructure

Maybe its technical users? Even linux is used by IT pros rather than regular people. I think tech people just dont like paying for anything.

Those of us that realise our salaries must come out from somewhere, do like paying others for the work we profit from.

I think the correlation of people who don't like paying for things and engineers are because most engineers are people who learned computers at a young age and found piracy, etc as their goto way to learn things because I know I couldn't afford Macromedia Dreamweaver when I was a kid, but I used it...

So now most think "why would I pay when I can pirate or use an alternative that is a pain to setup but once you get over that initial pain, it's smooth sailing" whereas others are like "I don't have time nor desire to do that, just take my $10/mo"

I personally stopped pirating and started paying for stuff for the same reasons you stated, and also because I felt like a hypocrite expecting people to pay me for my work, when I wouldn't pay others for their work.

I use mainly open source software so I don't use pirated stuff in any of my operational systems as it poses too many problems.

So too is licensed commercial software as Adobe's Photoshop licensing scam shows. One of my most annoying examples is UltraEdit a text and code editor originally from IDM Computer Solutions, now Idera, Inc.

Years ago I bought a perpetual upgrade license which at the time was quite expensive when compared to a single-version purchase but along the way IDM introduced a website locking mechanism to stop pirating and it turned out to be a big problem.

If one didn't uninstall UltraEdit correctly the IDM website deemed it to still be installed. Now, we're all pretty familiar with that except the trouble was that I'd be forever changing the O/S or blue-screening it and I'd often forget to uninstall U/E first - and it was the only instance of server-locked software on my machine (having vowed long before IDM changed the rules never to buy software licensed in this way).

I should note that multiple installed instances were never a problem as the license permitted three copies and I only ever had one installed copy at a time. The problem was continual difficulties in resolving the 'dead' license count on the server as the company just wasn't interested in helping. So the solution was to remain on the last of the non-locked versions (U/E for Windows v16.2).

So I felt cheated and I still do. Moreover, the company lost sales, I didn't buy UltraCompare nor did I put UltraEdit or it on my Linux systems as was my original intention.

Frankly, most commercial software sucks big-time, long live open source.

> If one didn't uninstall UltraEdit correctly the IDM website deemed it to still be installed.

In my experience with this kind of DRM, an email is generally enough to get them to reset the licence at their end. Still an inconvenience though, and you'll need to wait until they've done it.

I don't want to mislead anyone here, 'continally' means that was the case every time and that was quite a few but it was over some years - certainly not every few weeks or even months.

On the other hand, another program I purchased for several hundred dollars reqired activation but was much easier to deal with. Despite my vow, it was one of those situations where I needed a quick solution so I purchased it fully expecting the same trouble (note, there was no indication on the website about the activation process).

So to avoid any inconvenience through downtime, I inquired what happens in such circumstances and the almost immediate reply was 'there's no problem reactivating it so long as you don't do so too often within a given week'. Note, there was no need to inform the company beforehand.

From my experience, that's definitely the exception to the norm, so not all software companies are unreasonable.

I think it comes from being young with no disposable income and carrying that idea for too long. The older I get the more I pay. I have the money, I value my time, I value other people's time, I try to pay them one way or another.

I paid for Sublime Merge when I could have used one of the 10 other free git front ends. I can't say there is any particular feature I use that are not available in the other front ends.

I've been paying $299 up front and $120 a year for a text editor since the 90s and I rarely use it anymore (I use VSCode more) but I still find I go back to it once in a while and while $120 a year might sound like a lot it's less than I'm being paid by the hour so I can spend hours or days searching for alternatives or I can just pay the $120 and keep using the solution I know. I donate to several open source projects monthly and have given $50 or $100 here or there to others.

At the same time, I have to really get a ton of value out of the project. Blender, Kodi, a few large libraries that would take me months to repo I'm happy to donate. People making a 1k-5k line project and asking for funding though kind of seem like bad faith actors. It's like they're ignoring the tons of stuff they get for free and instead of giving back they're being miserly. It'd be like going to a potluck party, everyone brings something for free but one person brings beers and asks $2 per can while at the same time eating from all the free food.

People complain about corps using open source and not paying but I personally don't see it that way. Most tech corps give back in one way or another. Apple gives Clang, LLVM, JSC, WebKit... Google gives Chromium, Go, Dart, Flutter, Core Android, Skia, ... Facebook gives React, React-Native, PyTorch, ... Microsoft gives .NET, C#, F#, VSCode, Electron, Github (free hosting and free CI for open source), and even in if some corp, GM? uses open source I'm sure they give back to society in some way. There are few companies that are all take and no give.

Maybe another way to frame it, I see lots of open source as similar to volunteering. If go volunteer to clean up a park I don't get angry that lots of people come use the park without also volunteering to clean up. Sure, if my volunteering becomes a burden that makes too many demands of my time then I'm either going to stop or it's going to have to become a job but the fact that that threshold exists doesn't mean things below that threshold need to stop existing.

That is why I think most software should have an educational license that allow students to freely use their product. I mean even Steve Jobs said it on stage, no one pays for Adobe Photoshop in college. LOL

Most relevant software does have such licenses, that is how I used to buy Borland software.

Exactly that.

Yet we happily buy Macs and IntelliJ licenses and pay for alternatives to Gmail.

Linux, is quite frankly the best dev environment you can get. MacOS is a nice compromise if you need some commercial software too. At least it’s still a Unix.

Open source works when big players decide it's economical to comoditize something and do it in the open to share cost and get testing, also good will, etc.

This is why it's mostly in infrastructure. But it works in product applications - like Epic contributing to Blender because it enables their platform.

The article made me think of LMMS vrs Fruity Loops. I'm pretty sure a group of people sought out to make something like Fruity Loops because the launcher comes up searching for fruit. It has some fairly remarkable limitations and I was pleasantly surprised that the free version of Fruity works perfect for me on Linux and allows unrestricted midi export which is all I needed anyway. It was a little more than a issue of taste because they really did try to replicate it but probably lost interest due to the fact that Fruity isn't too hateful to buy and it doesn't keep abusing customers with subscriptions. They upgrade and people don't always have to get the upgrade.

Lightwave 3D was already not exactly what I call high end software competing with software that was really a lot more advanced but it carved out a niche. When Blender was announced it looked pretty darn close to Lightwave and after playing with it just didn't seem intuitive enough to keep with trying to convert what little I knew already to this. But now decades later, Softimage users are fleeing to Blender. I'm pretty certain now that I will not be buying any more Lightwave upgrades. Besides, Modo is better at being Lightwave than Lightwave is. Blender is the most successful free software art and film tool since we knew what free software is.

> open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure

Infrastructure you can trust. Most close sourced tech will lock you in and you're at their mercy - no thanks.

Because this is, well, the very purpose of proprietary infrastructure: to lock you in. Today, it seems to exist mostly in places where people have no choice.

> it covers time, but not adoption.

And you can't really cover "time" in an objective way before first determining some reasonable threshold for adoption, which is about as hard to objectively define as it gets. This means all the data presented in this article is basically meaningless.

For example, _way_ before Github we already had open source code hosting & collaboration servers. Trac comes to mind, but there's an even better example -- Gitorious, which also came before Github. Why did the author not even consider these two examples and only named Gitlab es the "replacement" for Github ? I could understand the omission of Trac since perhaps it was not primarily Git-based, but Gitorious? Gitorious was even at one point the #1 Git platform, eventually surpassed in popularity by Github (and much, much later by Gitlab).

Is this a "proprietary alternative replacing a open source one" ? How do you even take this into account in your "Time until OSS alternative" metric ? It just shows how meaningless this all is without a subjective definition of "alternative" or "replacement". There is no way to present this objectively as the authors are trying to do. The entire data set is manipulated to fit their point.

The rest of "replacements" are similarly questionable or even ridiculous, because, depending on your definition, they either ignore alternatives that came much earlier (because surprisingly frequently a proprietary "service" replaces a popular open source program) or call a service "an alternative" when it is simply not.

I think the key here is that open source infrastructure is often built and maintained by companies, while open source products are not. It takes time and effort to make things successful and companies have resources to make things useful that motivated groups of volunteers do not.

Thank you for brilliant comment highligthing the OSS issues.

But I believe you're missing the main point that OP is making: OSS will _statistically_ dominate every single niche.

There are just more reasons why non-OSS software would cease to exist - so eventually Inkscape will become a de-facto standard for Illustrator things; Blender will become de-facto standard of all 3D-Max things; OBS will become a de-facto standard of all Macromedia Flash Broadcast ... oh wait ... did that happen already?

> open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure.

Yes, but Android? When companies promote OSS products, they become successful.

> totally orthogonal to building "a good product that people want to use"

An OSS product will not end up on shelves with glitzy packaging for people to buy unless some company burns money to do that. It's not a fundamental law and OSS isn't orthogonal to anything.

AOSP is not a product and is not really usable by itself. It needs to be combined with Gapps and Google play services to really be considered a product. And I would argue that combination isn't a consumer facing product either. It's a product aimed at OEMs who combine it with their hardware and a few layers of additional hardware integration in order to create a consumer facing product. I know there are open source alternatives that replace many of these proprietary layers but they aren't very popular with the market.

I was about to write about 80% of what you wrote, so Im glad I parsed the comments first (and GIMP & Krita were going to be my examples, as well as the AWS-ification of things like Elastic) but to me the real crux is "open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure".