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What Free Software Is So Good You Can't Believe It's Free? (Reddit) (reddit.com)
27 points by throway88989898 on Feb 24, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments


the libraries/packages for all the languages we use, pip install $20,000 of work so i don't have to do it.

database stuff like postgres, sqlite is especially lovely for portability and ease of deployment.

Firefox, libreoffice, gimp, vlc, and Linux, Ubuntu particularly.

evince and calibre

compression software / archivers like 7zip

cli stuff like mosh, irssi, and htop.

i essentially no longer use proprietary software not out of any moral or economic stance, but just because it either does less or is vastly less extensible or takes too long to deploy or can't be trusted.

open software is wonderful.


$20K sounds like an underestimate by a couple orders of magnitude if you estimate a single year of full time work by one developer at $100K.

Many mid-sized Python projects use libraries that I’d guess together represent somewhere between $2M and $200M in developer hours - depending on whether you’re using frameworks or just relatively simple libraries.


Cue 100 comments about "you are paying with your data", but I use the following tools (happily) without paying for them with money: Gmail and the Google suite of products (drive, chrome, etc), Feedly, various social networks, Hubspot CRM, eventvods.com (I donate to them), Trello, Goofy (FB messenger for desktop), Sublime Text, RescueTime, AutoMute, Flux, Metabase.


So you use another client with gmail or are you okay with their slow interface?


I am pretty happy with the interface.


Personally, I can't understand that. Gmail was horrible on chrome and now that I'm on ff, it's even worse. The initial load is slower than loading outlook and queuing multiple commands is horrible.


1. Android

2. VLC and it's dependencies

3. Linux!!

4. Vscode

5. Node

6. GCC, Clang, Cmake ...

7. Git

8. Chromium

9. Webassembly, emscripten


- Inkscape - ffmpeg - Firefox - mpd


I thought cost to android was privacy from world's largest ad company.


GCC and KDE


Blender. C'mon now.




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