Ask HN: What software do you wish had a good open source alternative?

8 points by tim_sw ↗ HN
Product or infrastructure

9 comments

[ 10.6 ms ] story [ 36.3 ms ] thread
Lotus Notes
Groupware is still the big unsolved small-business problem in an open source stack. There have been many, many attempts to fix individual pieces of the problem, and a handful of overarching ones, but I'm not sure anyone has nailed it.

Client side: Evolution kinda/sorta works, most of the time. (And it doesn't run well on Windows or OSX.) The old Mozilla suite has just exploded -- it now takes three (haphazardly maintained -- versions last a few months at most) applications to manage what it used to do.

Server side: open source mail and mailbox servers are among the best, but is there any consensus on the best calendaring ? What clients can even talk to a CALdav server? Outlook can't.

Rosetta Stone
Check out duolingo.com Translate the web as you learn a language.

Disclosure: My professor at CMU runs the company.

duolingo isn't open source, so goes against the question.

That being said, duolingo is awesome :)

Anki - https://github.com/dae/anki

It's obviously not as full featured as Rosetta Stone, nor does it come with courses, nor does it use voice recognition - but it does rely on basically the same research into memory and I've had a lot more success using Anki than Rosetta Stone.

iTunes. I know Banshee is an alternative, but it seems to have trouble with syncing my books, for which I need Calibre as well. It would be nice to have an all in one solution that didn't suck as bad as iTunes.
Winamp. I'm basically looking for player which has separate concepts of a playlist and a media library.