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Shahed Nasser for Medusa

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What Tool Do You Wish Was Open Source?

Open Source has been rising in popularity and open source alternatives have been heavily competing with enterprise solution. Open source solutions provide developers with so much flexibility to create amazing projects, and encourages building strong communities.

Medusa is one of the open source solutions that gives developers and merchants alike full control over their tech stack when building their ecommerce stores. Medusa's customization and extendable features and capabilities makes it a strong alternative for enterprise solutions like Shopify.

What tools do you wish were open source? And how do you think the community would benefit from making such tools open source?

Top comments (49)

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stonith404 profile image
Elias Schneider

Notion. I love Notion but I would love to self-host it to have the control of my notes.

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shahednasser profile image
Shahed Nasser

That would be so cool. I remember seeing once an open source Notion alternative but I forgot what it was called

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Christian Kozalla • Edited

I remember seeing one, too. And found it: github.com/AppFlowy-IO/appflowy?re...

I just knew it was written in Rust and Flutter, so I found it pretty quickly. Is that what you meant?

Edit: Well, I see you already found it 😀😀😀

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stonith404 profile image
Elias Schneider

Yeah there are a few but Notion is unbeatable. Outline could be a good alternative but it's designed for companies.

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codewander profile image
codewander

Skiff my open source over time

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johnrodewald profile image
John • Edited

Check out anytype.io/. It's in closed alpha, but you are very much in the target audience if you care about a polished note-taking experience as well as open source and control of your data.

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murtuzaalisurti profile image
Murtuzaali Surti

Adobe 😜

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andrewbaisden profile image
Andrew Baisden

This!

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shahednasser profile image
Shahed Nasser

Inkscape is a nice alternative for illustrator

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murtuzaalisurti profile image
Murtuzaali Surti

And GIMP for photoshop

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

All of them?

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shahednasser profile image
Shahed Nasser

Smart!

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Lucia Cerchie

Amen to Notion. It was tough to figure out how to report a copyable code block in the APIs docs that needed updating-- no idea where to request a change. With open-source tools I just pay it forward by submitting quick fix PRs where I see them rather than having to figure out who to email, very specific flow and personal reason for wanting it to be open source lol, but makes for a good developer experience I think.

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shahednasser profile image
Shahed Nasser

That’s true it’s definitely a big benefit with open source tools that you can just report an issue and even send in a quick fix with a PR rather than issues being lost in the mail

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paulsaul621

GPT3 ❤

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just_moh_it profile image
Mohit Yadav

Facebook has open sourced OPT on GitHub - Meta's GPT-3 rival for free for everyone. The thing is, it requires infrastructure that costs worth a few dollars every second to run, and a very complex installation only if even want to write a single request to the model, and that would still take around 10-20 seconds to respond back...

SaaS is the only viable way I see forward for AI-based hosting, sadly 😞

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Michael Tharrington

I gotta go with the DAW (digital audio workstation), Ableton Live.

I'm not a dev, but as a consumer, I feel like this tech would benefit so much from being opened up to the community!

 
andrewbaisden profile image
Andrew Baisden

Also heard good things about Affinity Designer. My issue is that these alternatives can be good but they are still not Adobe 😂 I wish Adobe products were not pay to win.

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sentadoensilla profile image
sentadoensilla

Navicat

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theklr profile image
Kevin R

+1. Would love something in the OSS space comparable to Navicat

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neoprint3d profile image
Drew Ronsman

autodesk products

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Carl Walsh

Anything in particular? You can understand for business reasons its generally unlikely to open commercial products... But there can be compelling business reasons to make i.e. a file format parser/viewer/converter open source if the community would contribute back.

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neoprint3d profile image
Drew Ronsman • Edited

Fusion 360 probably. There is free cad but it ain't no fusion

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matthew-salerno • Edited

Inkjet or laser printers, please, it doesn't have to be this hard. Maybe not the type of tool you had in mind though. But yeah they need open source firmware badly.