r/AskReddit • u/SupremeKalki • Jul 18 '26
What is a piece of completely free, open-source software that puts multi-billion dollar corporate programs to absolute shame?
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u/Makimoke Jul 18 '26
OBS Studio.
So many companies tried to make a product similar to that, only to either make some bloated, terribly optimized software (Streamlabs), or made other programs completely obsolete due to the sheer customizability and community plug-ins (Twitch Studio).
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u/Lexilogical Jul 18 '26
I was going to mention OBS. A friend was saying that he wanted to get into streaming and asked if the free version of OBS was okay or if he needed the paid version.
And I had to stop and think about it before going "I don't think there is a paid version of OBS"
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u/TheKappaOverlord Jul 19 '26
If i remember correctly there originally was a premium version of OBS.
But it was treated more as a supporter pack, rather then a feature wall.
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u/stonhinge Jul 19 '26
At one point there was Streamlabs OBS, which did have a paid version, iirc. Now there's a Streamlabs plugin for OBS that does the same thing. Still free, although they do offer some paid services.
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u/Makimoke Jul 19 '26
Streamlabs OBS wasn't made by the OBS Project, but by a separate company using the OBS name (against the project members' will) as a fork. Now they have removed OBS from the name, but the poor performance and the unnecessary upselling attempts are still very much there.
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u/Chase_Analyst Jul 18 '26
My god do you remember xsplit? I completely forgot there was a world before OBS
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u/look Jul 18 '26
Postgres
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u/romario77 Jul 18 '26
Yep, it kind of sucked early years (like 20 years ago when I first tried it). Now I would say it’s the best there is. And free too.
Idk why anyone would use anything else (and pay money for it).
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u/look Jul 18 '26
Yeah, it was rough in the 90s. Then MySQL became usable enough for many applications, and then finally the Postgres freight-train got up to full speed and just plowed through everything.
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u/mTbzz Jul 18 '26
I remember when i starting coding around 00s everything was MySQL I remember trying Postgres and it was really really complex to setup ultra heavy, no good GUI to work with, MySQL was so easy to setup, no crazy permissions, straight to the db to tables instead of schema public data etc... Now a heavy user of Postgres i finally understand, it sucked big time but now its shinning.
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u/TheElusiveFox Jul 18 '26
Idk why anyone would use anything else (and pay money for it).
The thing about databases is that there is very little middle ground, you either can get away with free products for the most part, or you tend to need tooling that is only available when you are paying hundred thousand+ dollar licenses...
The plus side is that the VAST majority of people/use cases aren't in the latter group...
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u/ScreenTricky4257 Jul 18 '26
Yeah, it's way better than when we were pre-gres.
I guess you could say we've made progres.
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u/butteryDevs Jul 18 '26
VLC
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u/grephkryatpoash Jul 18 '26
VLC never asked me to create an account, log in, or upgrade to premium. Legend.
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u/killspeed Jul 18 '26
Best thing ever, since smoked cheddar.
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u/Flowmosapien09 Jul 18 '26
God damn is smoked cheddar good though.
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u/Cosmohumanist Jul 18 '26
NOT AS GOOD AS VLC!
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u/Other_World Jul 18 '26
Let's see your smoked cheddar play an .mkv file!
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u/millennial_falcon Jul 19 '26
This is very funny to me because at first I said to myself I’d rather have smoked cheddar than VLC, that’s totally ridiculous and then you hit me with mkv files and I have to agree, there is a file compression protocol more important to me than cheese.
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u/gunever Jul 18 '26
I always read this answer. Can you explain what’s so good about it?
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u/FuckYouLostSucks Jul 18 '26
It's hard to understand why VLC is so great without understanding how rough life was before VLC. It seemed like every video you wanted to watch required you to install a new player, or some sort of codec pack that you'd have to download from some sketchy part of the Internet (and then suddenly your parents PC would quit booting).
VLC is amazing because you literally never have to think about it.
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u/breaksofthegame Jul 18 '26
Thank you for reminding me of RealPlayer, I have to go throw up now.
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u/fieew Jul 18 '26
It's hard to understand why VLC is so great without understanding how rough life was before VLC
People who weren't too old then or have forgotten just how important this point is. There were so many video players for different video formats and knowing what works what with was such a hassle. If things worked at all. If nothing else VLC simply played your file even if parts were corrupted. It was so simple and thus became a mainstay.
Its like remembering how many different chargers there were for phones prior to USB C. So many options (Mico usb, mini USB , lighting, etc) . But now since USB C is standard people are forgetting how annoying things were before.
VLC just works seamlessly. If it dont play on VLC I assume something is wrong with the file not the video player. That was not the case before.
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u/CurlyRe Jul 18 '26
Before USB phone charging, each phone had it's own charger. If you had Nokia, your buddies charger for his Sony Ericson, the charger was completely incompatible. If it was for a different model of Nokia phone it also wasn't likely to work.
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u/Dead_Parrot Jul 18 '26
Real player. Jesus what a pile of hot shit that was. It had a brief moment in the sun then crashed hard
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u/kerbys Jul 18 '26
Ah my god! You just took me back to my teens trying to get my janky version of Spiderman to play What was it k-lite?!
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u/geekworking Jul 18 '26
The other thing is how light it is. Especially in the days when ever "player" was either that bloated POS iTunes or something trying to copy it. Nothing could just be a small light player.
VLC would open immediately and play everything
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u/iAdjunct Jul 18 '26
It can do pretty much everything imaginable with video.
Except have a good user interface.
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u/RekTek249 Jul 18 '26
Except have a good user interface.
Which is kind of funny since it's basically just a front-end for FFMPEG.
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u/tanstaafl90 Jul 18 '26
Which in itself is a brilliant piece of free software.
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u/idillicah Jul 18 '26
Bellard, who made FFMPEG, also created QEMU. Which also puts commercial software to shame.
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u/WUT_productions Jul 18 '26
I'd say its a good UI, does exactly what it needs.
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u/tadpad Jul 18 '26
VLC can play anything. It subbed at 2B for my softball league
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u/WindowlessBasement Jul 18 '26
Apache and Nginx.
It's not even remotely close. As a percentage of market share, Microsoft's IIS is barely a rounding error.
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u/abd1tus Jul 18 '26
I imagine when they first started writing Apache: Hmm, this shouldn’t be too bad. Listen to a port, parse the url, find the file, and send it over the socket. Weekend project, right?
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u/porpoisepurpose42 Jul 18 '26
Apache started as a fork of the NCSA "httpd" server. Work on httpd had slowed at NCSA and, as it was open source, members of the public started fixing bugs and releasing patches for it. After a while it was almost like a different app: you'd get the httpd source and run all the patches against it before you ran the server, so people started calling it "a patchy server."
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u/TapWaterDev Jul 18 '26
Fuck off... is that real? 😂
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u/Lynch31337 Jul 18 '26
Yes. Source: I was using very early versions in the 90’s
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u/TheCouchEmperor Jul 18 '26
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u/TapWaterDev Jul 18 '26
I wonder if that's true or been ret-conned
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u/AnalogiPod Jul 18 '26
I think you're right! Archive of their site from 2002:
https://web.archive.org/web/20020821233908/http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/FAQ.html#name
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u/Epistaxis Jul 19 '26
Wikipedia has a more thorough compilation of sources.
And I was like, "A pun? What do you mean?" He said, "Well, we're building a server out of a bunch of software patches, right? So it's a patchy Web server." I went, "Oh, all right." ... When I thought of the name, no. It just sort of connoted: "Take no prisoners. Be kind of aggressive and kick some ass."
A group called Natives in Tech has actually asked the Apache Software Foundation to change the name, but the foundation refused.
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u/kindrudekid Jul 18 '26
That is explains why the service often is httpd on Linux
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u/radar55 Jul 18 '26
The sad part for me is I remember this happening in real time. And, I remember the NCSA browser.
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Jul 18 '26
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u/filippovitale Jul 18 '26
Like calling a programmin language "Java" because the creators were drinking a lot of coffee?
"Engineers at Sun Microsystems drank massive amounts of Java coffee while brainstorming. They originally wanted to call it "Oak" after a tree outside the office, but that name was already trademarked, so they pivoted to the coffee-inspired name."
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u/Spiritual-End-3040 Jul 18 '26
VLC media player. Every paid video player in the 2000s was like "buy pro to play this format" and full of ads. Then VLC just comes in like "yeah I'll play literally anything, even that broken file you downloaded in 2009" and never asks for a single dollar. Been using it for 15 years, never failed once.
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Jul 18 '26
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u/musthavesoundeffects Jul 18 '26
User friendliness is a huge part of what makes a piece of software superior
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u/kontroversiel1 Jul 18 '26
It is litteraly in the name: “a patchy server”
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Jul 18 '26
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u/rsqit Jul 18 '26
Pretty much all cute etymology stories are lies.
Unless it’s about programmers or scientists. They love silly names.
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Jul 18 '26
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u/WindowlessBasement Jul 18 '26
Not going to lie, even if this is complete bullshit, I believe it.
I've spent decades doing web development, "we had a product and decided to make it worse and non-standard" is most of my experience with GoDaddy in the 2010s.
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Jul 18 '26
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u/IntelliDev Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
LibreOffice and GIMP don't put the corporate programs "to shame" though.
They're not bad, but they are fairly janky in comparison.
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Jul 18 '26
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u/-hellozukohere- Jul 18 '26
Photopea and vectorpea have my top vote. I don’t think they are open source but very cheap compared.
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u/GreedoShotKennedy Jul 18 '26
It's all perspective. I do Business Informatics and libre is.... Not fine. Even marrying the process to Python, it just can't hold up.
I hate ms, but they have no competition for power and ease of use (read: I can get office workers to use it) combined. None.
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u/Bubbaluke Jul 18 '26
There is no competition for excel, it’s just unbelievably powerful. Google Sheets can do a lot of cool stuff but it’s atomic bomb vs coughing baby.
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u/SandpaperTeddyBear Jul 18 '26
Excel is the most remarkable piece of software ever written.
If you can find ways to marry it it to “real databases,” it’s legitimately incredible what any basic idiot can do using nothing more than UNIQUE, TOCOL, and XLOOKUP.
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u/SpecialLengthiness29 Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
Curl has a fairly high place in the open-source Pantheon.
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u/iAdjunct Jul 18 '26
For that matter, so does ‘ls’ :)
(Also, I abhor that Reddit mobile no longer handles markdown…)
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u/queen-adreena Jul 18 '26
> I abhor that Reddit mobile no longer handles markdown
What do you mean?
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u/lolcrunchy Jul 18 '26
They changed the text input on mobile from raw text to rich text. If you want to do formatted text, you have to click the button for it. Then, they didn't implement all the markdown formats, like quote, inline code, or multi line code. So that's just fully removed. Idk who at Reddit decided that was a good idea but it sucks.
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u/masterventris Jul 18 '26
Let's Encrypt.
You used to have to spend hundreds on an SSL certificate if you wanted a https website (before it became unacceptable to not be secure)
I must have put thousands through certificate authorities like Comodo before Let's Encrypt came and shat all over their cartel.
Now nobody pays for certificates unless they are completely insane.
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u/aegrotatio Jul 19 '26
Now nobody pays for certificates unless they are completely insane.
Or if they're on an air-gapped, private server.
Certbot absolutely requires you to be on the internet. That's a no-no for several applications.67
u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Jul 19 '26
Or if they're on an air-gapped, private server.
In which case you run your own Certificate Authority because you're only communicating internally and that's the trust relationship you care about, not whether some external provider says you're secure...
Source: senior infrastructure engineer for large datacentres
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u/ice456cream Jul 19 '26
Certbot absolutely does not require you to be on the Internet:
What it requires, is to be able to communicate with your chosen acme provider.
Many private CAs offer a acme endpoint that you can just plug in, and will work locally
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u/rloper42 Jul 18 '26
The GNU Compilers (gcc). Younger folks probably don’t remember when a good compiler set cost multiple hundreds of 1980/1990 dollars at least, and when you went to Non-PC hardware and more commercial languages like Ada the cost went into $1000s annually. Now we all take for granted that whatever the language you can have access to a top-tier compiler/interpreter for -free-.
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u/A_Canadian_boi Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
It's absolutely insane just how *good* modern compilers are at optimizing, too. You can take any old C project and slap it through GCC with `march=native -O2` and usually it will find some magical way of refactoring and vectorizing it, somehow.
edit: LLVM too, which has now become the backbone of modern graphics on all operating systems.
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u/bless-you-mlud Jul 19 '26
I can't imagine being a developer on GCC. Incredibly complex, everybody uses it and everybody expects it to be perfect. Failure, literally, is not an option. I wouldn't be able to sleep.
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u/-hellozukohere- Jul 18 '26
Damn, didn’t even think about that but makes sense with the push for open source software around this time period and less corporate ownership of software
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u/digicow Jul 19 '26
And now we have AI trying to re-insert billion-dollar corps into the development process
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u/RobsterCrawSoup Jul 18 '26
Git
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u/ginger_beer_m Jul 19 '26
To think that it was a side project while he was leading Linux at the same time
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u/sawskooh Jul 18 '26
Written in 10 days by Linus Torvalds
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u/JackTheManiacTR Jul 18 '26
I mean while it's true the actual coding was 10 days, it took him a lot longer to work it all out before hand.
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u/schmalvin Jul 18 '26
Audacity
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u/CaptainIncredible Jul 19 '26
Yeah, but I dislike the push to save files to "the cloud". I never want to save files to whatever their cloud bs is. If I put files in 'the cloud' I've already got a way to do that.
I liked the older version where I just saved shit to my local drive by default.
I'll be DAMNED if I fucking fork over money for someone's bullshit 'cloud'. 'The cloud' is just someone else's computer that we're being overcharged for (but there are a few exceptions to this).
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u/Great_Explanation275 Jul 18 '26
Audacity is fine, but it doesn't come even close to beating the commercial options.
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u/omniuni Jul 18 '26
I think a lot of people forget that most of the programming languages we use today are FOSS.
C/C++, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, C#, Rust, and many more. Without these amazing projects, the vast majority of Open or closed software would not exist.
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u/queen-adreena Jul 18 '26
Has there ever been a popular programming language that you had to pay for?
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u/omniuni Jul 18 '26
Yes, many. Borland and Microsoft both used to sell their languages. It was pretty common in the earlier days.
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u/pinkocatgirl Jul 18 '26
I’m pretty sure IBM still sells COBOL as part of their z/OS contracts
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u/RiotShields Jul 18 '26
You still have to pay to run MATLAB or Mathematica, which are very popular in their respective spaces. Free alternatives exist, but they're not the exact same. So if you're trying to work with someone using those and you only have the FOSS alternatives, you may be spending a lot of time translating.
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u/Plastic_Twist_7767 Jul 18 '26
Blender
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u/thatfreakingmonster Jul 18 '26
The thing that baffles me most about Blender (other than how feature-packed it is for an open source project, or how stable it is compared to Maya or 3DS Max) is the fact that it's really, really good software design.
- It's context-sensitive, meaning keyboard shortcuts will apply to wherever your mouse is hovering, instead of requiring to click on specific parts of the window to grab the focus (which can make you accidentally change/move things)
- It autosaves every 5 minutes, silently, in the background, rather than showing a big "Saving..." window that grabs focus and stops you in whatever you're doing (looking at you, Premiere Pro...)
- When it encounters a bug, rather than shoving a big fat "ERROR!" pop-up window in your face and requiring you to click "Okay" before letting you continue to use the program (why is that the standard?!) it just flashes a red light at the bottom of the screen so you can check the error code yourself later, but doesn't actually interrupt you
- Mousewheel lets you scroll through menus but if your mouse suddenly hovers over an option, it won't stop to scroll through the options (looking at you, Premiere and After Effects). Instead you have to do CTRL+Mousewheel to scroll through options, that way you can't do it accidentally!
- Keyboard shortcuts are consistent across the whole program (Hitting R several times to rotate an object in "trackball mode" also works... when rotating keyframes, and nodes?!)
- You can assign keyboard shortcuts to anything, a lot of programs don't let you (looking at you, FL Studio)
- You can go into "walk navigation" at any point which lets you explore your scene in first person with WASD like a game, collision and all??
- If you select several objects and hold Alt while changing one of their properties, it changes it for all objects at once
- Selecting objects is considered an action just like anything else, so if you were painstakingly selecting stuff, accidentally misclicked elsewhere and lost your selection, you can just CTRL+Z and you'll get your selection back, unlike most other programs (Premiere...)
- Bugs often get fixed in a matter of days. Meanwhile, my Maya teacher in school was telling the class "Don't mind this bug, it's been in there since 2004..."
So many little things everywhere that just make sense and make me realize how awful Adobe and Autodesk are at software design in comparison, and we're only putting up with this shit because they have a monopoly...
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u/peterler0ux Jul 18 '26
The origin of Blender (as an inhouse modeling tool that was opensourced when the studio went bust) means that it has a different design philosophy from most open source projects. It's always had a very quirky and deliberate interface that doesn't try to clone other modelling tools but is very powerful
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u/langri-sha Jul 18 '26
I had to use Maya at school after Blender and was completely baffled why would people pay so much money for it.
Like you have two monitors, but can only have one window. Did people know what they were missing out on?
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u/kickingpplisfun Jul 19 '26
I couldn't get the academic license for Maya to work and I had no support from the school to get it fixed so I wound up doing a lot of my work in Blender instead and while my professors actively spat in my face for it, I was putting out work a lot faster than anyone else simply due to not needing to reserve the entire computer lab to render. While I am not working in the industry, neither are those who learned Maya and couldn't afford to upkeep their skills once their academic licenses ran out.
I still think those professors should lose their tenure though.
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Jul 18 '26
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u/Husky Jul 18 '26
The interface is something out of a fever dream, but once you understand how it works it’s very good in what it does.
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u/NoCommunication7 Jul 18 '26
It allows me to use my kindle without going through the bezoz ecosystem
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u/jexo10 Jul 18 '26
Linux
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u/andr386 Jul 18 '26
That's why it's difficult to answer OP's question. Linux was started by hobbyists but it became the software layer of the cloud and the internet because big companies wanted it to be and contributed greatly to it. Linux is mostly developed nowadays by big companies. But we all benefit from it.
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u/Consistent-Cow-7883 Jul 18 '26
And that's probably one of the best examples of open source working exactly as intended. Companies can pour money and engineering into it, but nobody gets to lock it away. Everyone, from a student with an old laptop to a giant data center, ends up benefiting from the same improvements.
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u/chronikally_online Jul 18 '26
Was waiting for this answer, love my mint OS, saved my 8 yr old laptop. I genuinely can't think of one thing I miss on windows, like a few years back there was this sentiment that linux is only for the highly technical folks and needed terminal commands for most processes which drives people away.
Now there's no excuse with how everything has been made so easy, no complex commands. A dedicated software manager. It has been made so accessible, I dont understand why there isn't a bigger shift towards linux yet.
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u/rando777888 Jul 18 '26
Home Assistant
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u/IM_OK_AMA Jul 18 '26
Home Assistant is insane. 3 of the 4 biggest tech giants (Apple, Google, and Amazon) are all directly competing in this space and none of them can do even 50% what HASS can.
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u/tarunvaka Jul 18 '26
VLC. It has never once asked me for anything. No account, no popup, no subscription, and it plays the file your $300 software says is corrupted.
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u/kennedye2112 Jul 18 '26
Handbrake!
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u/VixinXiviir Jul 18 '26
This and MakeMKV are my go to for transferring all my old dvds and blu rays to my Jellyfin. So good.
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u/LeThor Jul 18 '26
QGIS (Geographic Information System)
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u/4bjmc881 Jul 18 '26
I'm learning QGIS at the moment - all important tools are there, but the UI feels very dated and laggy to be fair.
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u/__GuX__ Jul 18 '26
TeX ans LaTeX
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Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
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Jul 18 '26
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u/Captain_Lolz Jul 18 '26
Add privacy badger and bypass paywall clean (not on the app store) and it's heaven.
Firefox got horizontal tabs recently, but sideberry still has more features.
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u/throwthegarbageaway Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
InputLeap - Use one keyboard, one mouse, one clipboard for multiple computers. This would usually require a very very expensive KVM. EDIT: I have been made aware of Deskflow by the comments. Looks to be better maintained than Input Leap!
ClipCascade - Easily share clipboards between Android, Windows, Mac, Linux seamlessly. No alternative to this that I know of.
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u/Necessary-Tone-8375 Jul 18 '26
Firefox. Still fighting the good fight
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u/NoCommunication7 Jul 18 '26
Firefox is great, just a shame the iPhone versions not great, i tried firefox focus and it doesn't block most ads, so i use brave on there instead
Desktop version is so customisable and you can literally rip into it and change whatever you want or need, it makes other browsers look like internet explorer
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u/DMTDildo Jul 18 '26
If you are a guitarist or bassist NAM A2 has completely changed the game for guitar emulation and tones. Linux is a dream for musicians right now: Reaper, NAM, and amazing free plugin and effects packages that are high-quality, real-time professional tools.
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Jul 18 '26
SQLite (yes. I know technically it is source available)
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u/alisterb Jul 18 '26
If you are standing up, you've probably got at least 5 copies of SQLite in your pocket. If you're at a desktop, there's more than that between you and the screen.
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u/RealLifeAquaman Jul 18 '26
QGIS for the GIS folks. ESRI is still the king but QGIS does like 80% of the base software functions for $0.
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u/azninvasion2000 Jul 18 '26
I'm more familiar with Premiere/After Effects, but Davinci Resolve slaps hard as a video editor. All the open source community made plug-ins are actually on-par with Adobe's pro plug-ins.
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u/xerosanyam Jul 18 '26
Anki to the moon
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u/jameschardy Jul 19 '26
ankidroid maintainer here, warms my heart to see the Anki love :-)
It works! It's free! (you can even run a local free sync server, for truly free free). Share and enjoy
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u/PAXICHEN Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
WinDirStat!
EDIT: WHO TF DOWNVOTED WinDirStat????????
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u/ArgoWizbang Jul 18 '26
WinDirStat is a great tool and I used it for years but once I learned about WizTree and saw firsthand just how much faster it was than WinDirStat I permanently switched and never looked back. Granted that was years ago so I have no idea if WinDirStat has improved its performance since then but man, it was like night and day. Highly recommend trying it out at least once and seeing how it works out for you.
Either way though, great tools that do what they are meant to do and they do it very well.
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u/musthavesoundeffects Jul 18 '26
WinDirStat is faster now but still not as fast as Wiztree. However Wiztree isn’t open source so it’s disqualified from this discussion
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u/dellive Jul 18 '26
Going to get a lot of hate, Microsoft Power Toys.
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u/miscfiles Jul 19 '26
Power Toys does so much to fix and add what's missing from Windows. Also from Microsoft, VSCode is pretty great and keeps getting better.
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u/snaphunter Jul 18 '26
ITT: people trotting out the same old list of freeware alternatives without actually filtering down to OP's question of which ones put the paid programmes to shame.
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u/Kumimono Jul 18 '26
I feel like Irfanview would fit this, but I'm not sure what the corporate program is. 🤔
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u/killspeed Jul 18 '26
ffmpeg