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

  •  Crotaro   ( @Crotaro@beehaw.org ) 
    2•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.