I'm not talking about low level infrastructure, but the user facing software. Offline desktop tools have rapidly started to become obsolete. Products like Office had to scramble to pivot because Google Docs was replacing them. Its been a while now since I have been emailed an actual office file instead of being sent a link to the live version.
A while ago it was common for Photoshop or illustrator to be used for UI designs and then it would be thrown over the wall to you as a PNG which you had to make sure you had the latest version of. These days everywhere I have worked has used a tool like Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch, and gives out a link which is always up to date, which you can fiddle with, write comments on, etc.
The market is rapidly shifting and I'm just not sure how FOSS is going to stay relevant in this space.
> The market is rapidly shifting and I'm just not sure how FOSS is going to stay relevant in this space.
How realistic is it to expect FOSS tools to directly compete head-to-head with these incredibly well-funded privately owned tools? The whole point of these companies is to solve the "hard" problems in order to gain a functional and competitive advantage in the market. FOSS OTOH deals with table scraps in terms of funding and technical talent. And let's face it, who are some of the biggest contributors to open source? These very same companies. They're happy to help keep the specific libs that matter to them up to date, but they're certainly not going to give away the entire product for free.
> Offline desktop tools have rapidly started to become obsolete. Products like Office had to scramble to pivot because Google Docs was replacing them. Its been a while now since I have been emailed an actual office file instead of being sent a link to the live version.
Just because the market moves in a particular direction doesn't mean it's the right decision for end users, all it means is that it's the right decision for the business. Take the mobile phone manufacturers removing the headphone jack. No customers asked for that, it was purely a move to drive sales of bluetooth peripherals.
There may come a time when running software locally becomes in-vogue again, who knows? It's companies that get to dictate the platforms because they own them. And as others have pointed out, it's not like these online collab tools aren't without their own issues. I guess I just don't understand why people think that FOSS can deliver polished end-user products on the scale that companies do.
Why can't FOSS do this, though? There's no reason Inkscape couldn't work the same way, where a document lives in the cloud and users pass around links to it.
It does require someone to maintain and pay for the cloud hosting. That shouldn't be unsolvable; that's not really any fundamentally different than hosting a download site for traditional FOSS. Donation-supported FOSS can work.
1. A generic CRDT library, preferably in C or something that exposes a C interface. This is probably very hard or even impossible, depending on how much must be abstracted and how much work the developer must do to express edits in terms of the CRDT.
2. A P2P backend for said library for streaming edits.
3. A networked data store, maybe as-a-service, for versioning and persistence.
2 and 3 might even be made transparent to non-CRDT-aware applications through FUSE, but that's not a hard requirement.
If the software you use is decently priced and does what you need then fine. I'm sure that support is fine too.
When I call for help in say Krita or Samba on the mailing lists, I often get the actual programmers responding. Not all the time but quite often.
I've been running an IT company for 22 years. I have a fair idea about what the market is up to. It turns out that a wanky LDAP n Kerberos combo will still be available next year, as it has for the last ... (when did Windows NT domains morph into AD? What a bloody nonsense)
What does your TV or car boot?
Design space ... what do you use day to day - I'd love to see your blog/show piece?