HN Explorer

Ask HN: what are examples of successful "open-source alternatives"?

96 points by barrrrald ↗ HN
It seems like every day there's a Show HN post for another "open source alternative" to a popular SaaS app.

And indeed, this search shows 34 pages of results, with clones of everything from Notion to Jira to Hex to Figma to Carta. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=open+source+alternative

I have some personal hypotheses on why this is a common pattern, but I am mostly wondering whether any of these have really succeeded as projects / businesses. Are there any examples of these "open source alternative"-type products really taking off?

This can be taken however you want – either big revenue, or big user base – I'm just looking for some marker of being a breakout hit.

162 comments

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q3k
A certain (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
[dead] Qwertious
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krisoft
Being successful and being “the main anything” is not the same though.

Linux as an operating system is very succesfull. Used by all the time on a ton of servers powering a lot of important things. It is also not the main desktop OS. Both of these statements can be, and are, true.

gpm
~45% followed by Windows at ~28% iOS at ~18% and MacOS at ~6% (huge error bars on all those numbers).

But really despite having the plurality of the end user market it's real dominance is in the server market.

Zambyte
It's certainly the main kernel in my house, between the phones, desktops, steam decks, servers, laptops... I'd put the market share at about 95% or so.

If you mean globally, not sure. It doesn't affect me

bawolff
Indeed, that was my first thought. (Almost) Every mainstream best in class open source product was at one point the kind of crappy open source alternative to an established product.
RachelF
Don't forget BSD - all Apple operating systems are based on it.
bawolff
Arguably they aren't the "alternative" so much as a variant of the original thing that got open sourced.
adastra22
BSD stands for Berkeley Software* Distribution (of UNIX). It is a direct descent of UNIX itself, not an open source clone.
ThrowawayR2
The original poster is asking about open source alternative SaaSes and Linux/BSD, gcc, Blender, Firefox, etc. is not a SaaS.
ZunarJ5
Blender.
icholy
Blender didn't start as open source.
cadr
True, but it's been open source now a lot longer than it was closed source.
viccis
I would also say that it was never even close to reasonable competition to commercial alternatives until it open sourced, and it was a while after that before it started to catch up. I still remember some of the artists at Gearbox laughing when I brought Blender up in the late 2000s when I was a teenager touring the studio.
owenpalmer
Don't really see why this is relevant. Blender was open sourced over 20 years ago
josephcsible
Do you mean succeeded as in "has a large user base" or as in "makes a lot of money"?
jvanderbot
If it's easy to answer one or the other, perhaps let's start with that one.
barrrrald
Either! Basically any measure an objective observer could look at and be like, "oh yes this is a breakout hit with a bright future ahead of it"
tommoor
GitLab, Mattermost, RocketChat would be a few good examples of products that began as OSS alternatives to well-established players.

Outline (https://www.getoutline.com) is successful on most metrics you'd judge a business and OSS project on.

I'm not sure if any of these ever pitched themselves explicitly that way on HN though. I think explicitly labeling as an "Open source alternative" brings a lot of baggage and expectations, and often says more about the maintainers philosophical POV than ability to create a sustainable business ;)

barrrrald
GitLab is a really interesting example, but I don't know if it'd have positioned itself as an "open source alternative"

As for Mattermost, RocketChat, and Outline – I think these are great examples of projects positioned this way that haven't broken out. They all seem great, but it's not clear that being an "open source alternative" to Slack really worked for Mattermost...

willsmith72
i know of some gigantic companies using self-hosted mattermost for data privacy reasons. perhaps they have less marketing incentive, but i would certainly call that a success
tommoor
> I don't know if it'd have positioned itself as an "open source alternative"

It was literally a pixel for pixel open source clone of GitHub for the first few years.

brtv
Nextcloud and Bitwarden come to mind.
hugolundin
KiCad.
the__alchemist
I came here to post this. It's improved much in the past few years. I never feel like I need to pay for Altium etc, or that my designs are limited by the software. I have some gripes, but they're not dealbreakers!
jjmarr
gcc comes to mind. Remember when every computer came with its own C compiler? LaTeX also killed proprietary mathematics typesetting.
drewmcarthur
this is what i’m thinking. HTTP itself only overtook Gopher when it was released into the public domain, to compete with Gopher’s proprietary licensing.
jhbadger
GCC's gotten so popular that some operating systems like MacOS lie about it and make "gcc" an alias by default for their clang compiler!
tsunagatta
OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) has largely become the standard over its (usually proprietary) competition.
gpm
Examples I haven't seen mentioned yet:

Firefox. Atom/VSCode (Sublime Text clones). Android (iOS clone).

Various databases (postgres, mongodb, etc).

Reddit (Digg alternative, since closed source) though I'm not sure releasing their source code had anything to do with their success.

HashiCorp in general sort of counts though it's harder to say "it was competing against X".

chx
Care to elaborate in what ways Firefox counts as successful? Maybe it had a brief period of success (maybe) but that was long ago.
gpm
There are many ways to measure success, perhaps the easiest (though not necessarily the best) is money. Mozilla currently has net assets of >$1billion almost entirely earned off of it's back. It was without a doubt been a wildly successful product for the non-profit and to suggest otherwise is ludicrous. Likewise it continues to earn >$0.5billion/year revenue for that non-profit, to suggest that it doesn't continue to be a wildly successful product is ludicrous.

Could it have done even better for itself? Sure. Being the best possible version of yourself isn't necessary to have been successful though.

setopt
Before the rise of Chrome, it hovered at 20-30% market share for many years. After the preceding period of IE dominance, I’d call that successful.
antifa
Do you live in a world where success means "#1" and failure means "not #1"?
adastra22
Firefox is open sourced Netscape Navigator 5.0.
asadotzler
No, it's not. We tossed that code 6 months after the open sourcing and started fresh to build the Communicator clone which we then tossed aside for the entirely new Firefox. Firefox is not Navigator 5. That's plain inaccurate.
adastra22
In the context of this question, I think it's perfectly accurate. Firefox did not start as a grassroots developed open-source project, like Linux did.
mellow-lake-day
Atom development has ceased, does that count as successful?
mihaaly
All will cease at some point but we shouldn't wait too long just to be pragmatic judging success.
gpm
Yes. You don't have to continue to exist forever to be successful, to suggest otherwise would be to amongst other things suggest that no human ever succeeds.

Atom development didn't cease because it failed as a product. It ceased because the company building it was acquired by a company that had already built a (open source) clone to compete with it.

setopt
I wouldn’t call Atom/VSCode “clones” of Sublime Text. They were clearly inspired, but are missing the minimalist interface and high performance that for me are key features of Sublime Text.

In this sense, I consider Zed to be more of in the Sublime Text genre than VSCode or Atom was.

lccerina
Android is not a iOS clone, and open source-ish (Google still decides the roadmap)
gpm
Android existed (internally) before iOS, but to quote a google engineer working on it at the time, iOS released and they went "We’re going to have to start over."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...

> and open source-ish (Google still decides the roadmap)

Open source doesn't mean developed by committee, it means the source is released openly and under a permissive license. That is unquestionably done with android, to the point where competitors have taken that source and made competing phones without Google's involvement.

tolleydbg
Both WireGuard and OpenVPN
BrandoElFollito
Wireguard had no user management (or rather, some kind of identity you can cancel). This is not useable in an entreprise environment without some kind of complicated backend. Something like tailwind.

I live WG though, a magical product.

Same for openVPN, though there are some extending that help.

Compare this with a commercial VPN that will directly plug into your identity system.

commercialnix
Wireguard layer-3 tunneling identity (public key) is for machines, not human users. Rolling out Wireguard in an "enterprise environment" for over 600 user laptops and desktops (mix of Linux and some macOS* and Windows*) with our existing configuration management (SaltStack/GitOps) was extremely easy to do.

Where additional layer-3 tunnels that were user or group specific were necessary, we did some very light scripting that any sophomore-level Sys Admin can handle.

We already have BeyondCorp / ZeroTrust for any layer-4 and above authentication.

>> Compare this with a commercial VPN that will directly plug into your identity system.

This would be something out of the clicky-clicky industrial complex.

BrandoElFollito
Thanks for the feedback.

How did you manage the IP assignment, keys revocation, ...?

How did your ZT environment worked with WG on the network level? (zScaler creates its own tunnels for instance)

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commercialnix
Looks like I forgot to clarify the meaning of the asterisk, so here:

[*] we charge a hefty premium to manage third party OS in a sideways way by offering a 75% discount on our endpoint OS, with exception to special and authentic cases (some 3D CAD or other).

Three important points of context to highlight here:

0.] We don't hire for "butts in seats", we hire for aptitude and/or talent then also culture very carefully and if someone isn't vibing, isn't "getting it", we fire very fast (locking them out with the same stack we use to operate customers' devices).

1.] We don't use Git in the typical pedestrian centralized way (ie GitLab), Git is of a distributed and we use Git as such in an approach that gracefully is combined with other things that, like Git, do their one small thing and do it right. Our approach has been described as "nirvana for security and compliance" and is still considered somewhat novel. We would call this "bespoke", but the use of this approach has been uniform in each place.

2.] We consider our Git approach with SaltStack something that any entry-level SysAdmin or even IT Ops should be able to wrap their head around. Salt obviates a lot of Python we might otherwise write. The end customer has "engineers" who do write in some interpreted languages, maybe some languages on JVM and some C#, but they don't write software in a sane way, so they pay for our clicky clicky to talk to our API for what we have done. Ultimately, the customer doesn't really "do computer" (even though they try), they are users, "power users" at best (which is kind of worse actually). Open Source is about *source code* ie software, which is the part we are good at and the customer is not.

3.] Without the existing wealth of open source software, we would not even attempt to be playing the same ballpark we are now. Context number zero is more strongly why we are much more confident with what we have than anything in the whitelabel-option Managed Services Provider space, but this context number three is also a big part.

The BeyondCorp / ZeroTrust in place does all of its "smart" like time-of-day or some statistic/heuristic at layer-4 (TLS). The layer-3 is there too because defense-in-depth. I know we have something on the roadmap to add more smarts to the Wireguard pieces (I'd have to ask someone). The non-management Wireguard tunnels, the ones for "app", don't come up without TPM unbothered and a user's hardware key being involved. We haven't yet seen a BeyondCorp / ZeroTrust suite from a vendor we found compelling or "we really want X feature they have" that we can't easily (and more quickly than a sales cycle) do ourselves with our model.

Background:

The customer had existing IPAM, but it was too much of a mess. The kinds of customers that don't have clean IPAM also don't have IPv6. So we went ahead and used some of the IPv6 that our corp has from ARIN with proper agreements in place with customer to make using our IPv6 space "okay" and endpoints do 4in6 to reach customers' existing IPv4 subnets (mostly RFC1918).

Every device in our purview is notated as a YAML versioned by Git for SaltStack to do whatever on the device. Each machine has a unique id, similar to the /etc/machine-id concept, with data for that machine expressed as SaltStack Pillar.

Typical incident:

Suppose machine morty.foo.baz.example.net is stolen from a user's car. Upon awareness of the incident the key "status" in the YAML for morty is updated to have value "stolen" added to change management (Git). A look up is done on every public key used by the Wireguard peer named Morty, and every device that uses any of those public keys gets poked to apply the new data expressed as Salt.

Remediation:

On another device running Wireguard named Rick, the public key for Morty is now expressed in a new way by S...

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dublinben
cURL is ubiquitous. It's unclear whether there is even a proprietary alternative still being sold commercially.
jimbokun
Postman seems like the main proprietary competitor for the same use cases.
piyuv
Isn’t it just a curl gui, using curl under the hood ?
entrepy123
DokuWiki.

This database-free FOSS wiki engine [1] with a focus on simplicity is 19 years old, still gets updated, has useful plugins [2] for additional features, is a great choice for many uses, has adopters that use and love it, and has an estimated 50,000-250,000 installations [3].

As someone wrote, "DokuWiki is and will remain king for many simple reasons" [4].

  [1] https://www.dokuwiki.org
  [2] https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugins
  [3] https://www.dokuwiki.org/faq:installcount
  [4] https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/145l121/what_wiki_do_you_recommend/jnmd2t7/
MitPitt
How does it compare to MediaWiki, another very old and very extensive engine?
entrepy123
They are just different animals.

Compared to MediaWiki, DokuWiki is "simpler" all around and more lightweight. Simpler in visual design, simpler in how data is stored, simpler in most regards.

But in practical use, they are actually pretty close in many ways. DokuWiki is almost like a thoughtfully pared-down (from the start) MediaWiki-like wiki system.

DokuWiki still sticks pretty closely to normative wiki conventions about how a wiki "should" (is expected to) work (a la MediaWiki or maybe even as far back as WikiWikiWeb). Visit a non-existing address allows to create a new page; pages use some succinct syntax (which maybe can be replaced for Markdown using some plugin); pages look just fine on web or mobile; etc.

Also, the stored data of MediaWiki is arguably more immediately portable (and perhaps more immediately accessible just after a disaster, so long as there was a backup), since it is just a hierarchy of text files. There is no database to administrate in DokuWiki.

Granted, MediaWiki is a de facto standard. But this does not make it the only sane choice.

If you spin up and make some content in 2 or 3 different wikis, you will see that they have different strengths and weaknesses. There are a lot of interesting and great wiki systems. MediaWiki and DokuWiki are among the greats. There are obviously others, too, and people love different ones, which is wonderful. The more the better.

Some a fair-ish comparisons seem to be at https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/dokuwiki+mediawiki and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

entrepy123
* Obvious typo: "data of DokuWiki is arguably more immediately portable... There is no database to administrate in DokuWiki." should replace "data of MediaWiki is arguably more immediately portable...There is no database to administrate in DokuWiki."
tomarr
Wordpress is quite a big one?

I think Blogger was the main alternative back then, but there were probably several commercial ones with reasonable market share.

ccouzens
Wikipedia - I remember when Encarta was how you used an encyclopaedia on your computer.
sebastiansm
R or the Python Scientific stack over SAS or SPSS.
jimbokun
Or MATLAB.
sebastiansm
I was going to write that software too, but still think that Matlab is so much superior, or maybe is the nostalgia from university years.
gandalfgreybeer
Having worked with both Python and matlab in both academic and professional settings, I don't think there's any project where I would pick matlab first unless my hand is forced
jimbobthrowawy
I think GNU Octave is the free software MATLAB alternative. Since it aims to be highly compatible and run the same code. Various python stacks do more things, and do them differently.
MH15
MATLAB is not open source, or even free.
oneplane
Pretty much anything on the CNCF landscape. Tradeoffs are generally the same as always: trading control and effort for time and money. If you cannot make that tradeoff (i.e. because you cannot handle the control and effort or because you don't have the time or money) the choice is made for you.

Of course there can be a USP and quality aspect, take basic resource metrics for example, you can pay someone to do that for you, or you can do it yourself, the difference in effort is marginal but the difference in cost can be extreme. But there are cases where that marginal difference in effort is what tips the choice towards paying someone else to do it. In my experience, if you cannot make such efforts, or don't have a plan to make such efforts in the future, you're either in the wrong business or are doomed to fail purely on PnL.

SinePost
I'll narrow the scope to "OSS software that is common and where its license is not a selling point to most of its users." KHTML/Chromium/WebKit (to Internet Explorer), Firefox, MySQL, BSD (to AT&T Unix), GCC, LLVM, GIMP, InkScape, VLC to name a few.