this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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What was your gateway product to open source? (www.cnet.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I want to talk about our gateway products to open source. You know, that one product or software that made us go, "Whoa, this is amazing!" and got us hooked on the world of open source.

What made you to jump ships? Was it the "free" side of things like qBittorrent? Did you even know that some of your programs are open source before you got into the topic?

For me those products were:

  • Android
  • Firefox
  • VLC
  • Calibre

Am thinking to order some merch and I wanna make it more accessible to people unfamilliar with open source culture. Now, am looking for fairly normalized but still underrepresented product -- maybe it could serve as a conversation starter and push some people to open source

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Firefox 1.0

Not only was it better than IE6, it was also free! Not sure how aware I was of the libre aspect initially, but around the same time I also dabled in (Mandrake? Mandriva?) Linux, which exposed me to GNU, GPL, and the idea of copyleft.

And then there was VLC.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

For me it was a combination of factors: Windows has been going down the shitter for at least 10 years now, FOSS software has been getting better and better, and I've learned to use more FOSS tools as I grew tired of dealing with Windows.

If I had to point at one project that made me go "Wow, this is amazing", I'd say ffmpeg. Even in my Windows days, I've always enjoyed digital preservation, when I discovered ffmpeg around 2015 it was an eye opener, so many features, so many options, I've been using it on a daily basis ever since.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago
  • OpenOffice
  • Firefox
  • Thunderbird
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Nothing, I didn't think much of it or cared if something was open source or not. It's when I started to become privacy conscious I started to care, though one program in my childhood that I actually thought was cool but not necessarily because open source was 7-zip - it's free winrar that worked better for me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

For me it was first VLC without really knowing what FOSS was, then KeePass while getting to know a bit about it, and finally Thunderbird. What did it for me was just how good and bullshit-free they were, especially in comparison to paid competitors. They really are the best products in their field, proving the quality often behind FOSS software.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I like to think of FOSS as enshitification-proof

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

FOSS is enshitification-hardened, not proof.

VLC remains awesome because the guy (maybe Jean-Baptiste Kempf?) that controls the project has refused to be bought, has in fact refused HUGE sums of money.

The original author of any project has to right to sell it with the corresponding licence changes at any time.
There's some legal grey area on something like Linux or VLC which have MANY MANY developer hands in the pie, and existing users could certainly fork off the existing releases, but VLC could pivot tomorrow to a for profit company and make future releases of the official VLC a paid product, if they choose too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

True, and so all honour to the creators for remaining FOSS, especially smaller projects spearheaded by a single dev

Altough usually when a shift like that happens in bigger projects there's a community fork, and the original project withers. Like Owncloud -> Nextcloud , OpenOffice -> LibreOffice, MySQL -> MariaDB

You could argue there's some degree enshitification through the Ubuntu snapification driven by Canonical. Although that's not so much about making Ubuntu deliberately worse, it's more moving Ubuntu forward in a way that aligns with Canonical's strategic goals. So its "paying the strategy tax" rather than direct enshitification.

For collaborative projects like Linux I believe every contributor would need to agree to any license change, which is practically impossible

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Although I technically used OSS before (ie Firefox), Linux (Ubuntu) is what made me actually start caring about it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I just really wish I could answer 'Obsidian' 😓

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Firefox and VLC on Windows for years, which just worked. Later XBMC/Kodi and fileserver which where s... on windows but, again, just worked on Linux. When Windows later on kept nagging for something I migrated to 100% Open Source and have been a happy camper ever since!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Simply because I haven't seen it mentioned yet: 7-zip
But realistically VLC and Firefox

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There really wasn't a specific gateway product, and I'm still using closed and open source solutions back to back.

User experience and user interface are more important to me than open source. The only consideration I have beyond that would be privacy & security.

For instance I've always used Firefox and rejected Chrome due to data privacy concerns, and would use a portable chromium installation if a website was inaccessible with FF. On the other hand side MS Office and Photoshop are vastly superior to libre office and gimp.

When it comes to applications I use once in a blue moon for a few minutes at a time, I'll usually go for FOSS, but moreso because it's free and the UI can be as ugly as it wants if I don't have to stare at it for hours on end.

And well, I absolutely despise Apple as a company, so using Android was pretty much without alternatives, after BlackBerry discontinued their OS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I'm very much the same. It mostly depends on "does the open source program do what I need/want?" If not, I'm okay with using a closed source version of it.

My current number one example here would be spreadsheet calculators. Years ago (and for my personal use) I only used LibreOffice/OpenOffice because it did/does all I need. But at work I need to use MS Excel not only because it's what the company has but also because the tables function and everything that relates to it (like data slicers, automatic expansion of formulas and formats, etc.) is really awesome and either super complex to replicate or straight up impossible in LibreOffice. And a couple months ago I decided to optimize the Excel sheets at work by incorporating some VBA macros. It's super useful and I couldn't find an open source alternative to it that would not run into problems on existing VBA-Excel sheets very, very quickly.

On the other hand I have photo editing / art programs. For those, I happily hopped from one FOSS to another (GIMP to Krita and I think I had a third one at some point as well) because I actually only need the "basic" and "on the surface" tools of such programs. And so I never even began feeling a pressure to use a closed source program.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I still remember how Firefox's tabbed browsing blew my mind.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Opera had it YEARS prior. Back when they were an actual browser and not just another chrome frontend.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Excuse me, what is tabbed browsing?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Opening multiple websites at once in different tabs. Back in the days, browsers would open an entire new browser window in the background, so your task bar would be one giant array of browser instances. Until it inevitably crashed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Wow that is so cool. I didn't know that

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Probably Mozilla.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Yep, for me it was the Mozilla Suite and then Firebird (to become Firefox)