[krick]

> Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux.

Woah, really? There are plenty.

Photoshop & Lightroom debatable, but I can agree — nothing FOSS really substitutes them, unfortunately.

AutoCAD & ArchiCAD. Solidworks. Pretty much all specific 3D modelling tools like Poser (though I don't really need that last one).

Ableton, Cubase, everything from NativeInstruments, including sample libraries which sometimes are the reason why you need KONTAKT, and not some other sampler. U-he Zebra. Hundreds of various VST plugins from different developers: reverbs, phasers, limiters, etc. Often this stuff is quite trivial, but there just is some amount of domain knowledge which random opensource developer just doesn't possess. That's why free stuff available sucks or even doesn't exist.

Decent speech recognition and text to speech. Nonexistent.

OCR is quite better, but still loses to commercial alternatives like ABBYY. Understandably so.

To put it shorter: pretty much any software which isn't trivial to write or requires domain knowledge. The only decent examples of these in the FOSS world I can remember are Blender and Krita.

[josh-wrale]

> Ableton, Cubase, everything from NativeInstruments, including sample libraries which sometimes are the reason why you need KONTAKT, and not some other sampler. U-he Zebra. Hundreds of various VST plugins from different developers: reverbs, phasers, limiters, etc. Often this stuff is quite trivial, but there just is some amount of domain knowledge which random opensource developer just doesn't possess. That's why free stuff available sucks or even doesn't exist.

Ardour is the basis for Harrison consoles which are fairly well respected. I would also comment that open source audio plugins tend to look much worse than they actually sound. Totally vanilla UI for an audio plugin doesn't inspire much confidence in the audio quality (watch Century of the Self for more on that). I'd personally like to see a real contender for open source clone of Propellerhead Reason. Cubase is far less programming work than Reason IMHO.

Sample libraries aren't "source code" and in that sense they cannot be truly "open sourced". Creative content such as this is more on the Creative Commons side of matters -- for better or worse.

[krick]

> much worse than they actually sound

UI is usually bad indeed, but I wouldn't really care that much if the actual effects would be done alright. They are not.

> I'd personally like to see a real contender for open source clone of Propellerhead Reason

Well, doesn't really matter: the point still is there's no decent FOSS DAW. Ardour is not terrible, but… just no. And there still is no real use for DAW without any instruments or effects anyway.

But, as a side note, I've never heard of a musician writing some more or less sophisticated music (that is not Prodigy) with Reason. I've used it for a while, and it's pretty nice, all this "hardware interface" concept is really cool, but it's very limited and very limiting. It's like, well, using Mac or Windows vs using Linux — what I can do is strictly defined by the developer, no much freedom out there. Cubase is complicated and glitchy as hell, but with it I really can do pretty much whatever I want. Simpler (and much cheaper) alternative to Cubase I would say might be Reaper, but not Reason.

> Sample libraries aren't "source code"

No, that's not the problem. Sample libraries for KONTAKT are sample libraries for KONTAKT. It is not a bunch of .wav files, it's a proprietary format, which wouldn't work with some other sampler out of the box — unless you specifically make it to, which (I guess) might be not trivial, as it's made specifically to avoid competition. So even if you buy sample libraries for that, or download it from torrents or whatever — it's not about library licensing, it's about being unable to use it with anything but KONTAKT.

[tamana]

IIRC Blender went open source due to an generous gesture by its proprietary owner and a crowdfunding effort that was years ahead of Kickstarter.

[krick]

Oh. That really explains a lot and reinforces the point. But still it's very successful open source project.

[merb]

> Decent speech recognition and text to speech. Nonexistent.

Nuance Dragon SDK runs on Linux, it's not FOSS but it runs there. Just no GUI / Command Line App.

> OCR is quite better, but still loses to commercial alternatives like ABBYY. Understandably so.

Nuance and ABBYY SDKs running on Linux. Quite well. Just no GUI / Command Line App.

Oh and you don't need to use FOSS only just because you are using a FOSS OSS.

And yes Audio / Video is pretty weak on Linux, thats true. However for most other things there are good enough tools. Especially LibreOffice is really really great. It's better for Users migrating from Office 2003 than to migrate to 07/10/13/16. However there are weaknesses, too, like the Dictonary.

Also some bigger Office's Macro's aren't easy replaceable. However Linux is good enough for the most.

[krick]

Question was about FOSS. Answer is about FOSS. Thus, what you are saying might be useful for somebody, but totally irrelevant to my comment.