   Am I the only one that enjoys...?
  Am I the only one that enjoyes seeing companies make something, then charge a heap of money for it...   and then watch as some opensource/free alternative comes crawling out of nowhere that is 17 times better than there overpriced product and is FREE!?!A few examples of these:.mp3 replaced by .oggMP3''s are great yes.  They are widely used, and don''t seem to have to many restrictions placed on them.  Nice to see a opensource alternative though.I wana say something like Visual Studios replaced by Maya or some of the other alternatives, but I''m not aware in this area well enough.Uhh, maybe there arn''t as many as I though?  I''m sure you can think of a few more?Does it give you a fuzzy feeling or is it just me? 
quote:Original post by Cyber-Ace  .mp3 replaced by .oggMP3''s are great yes.  They are widely used, and don''t seem to have to many restrictions placed on them. Umm... have you ever seen what you have to pay to put out a commercially available mp3 decoder?   I Want My Island"Luck is for people without skill."- Robert (I Want My Island) ;  I don''t understand why people think it is wrong when somebody or a company gets paid for their hard work and investment. One who thinks everything should be free probably never has worked a day in his life. ;quote:Original post by Cyber-Ace  I wana say something like Visual Studios replaced by Maya or some of the other alternatives, but I''m not aware in this area well enough. 1) It''s Visual Studio.2) Maya is a 3D modeler, not a software development package.3) Maya costs $2000+. It''s not free. ;  MSN/ICQ/etc replaced by Miranda.  MSN/ICQ/etc are freeware, but they arn''t open-source, like Miranda is. ;  Vorbis isn''t the killer codec it''s made out to be.  It gets great low bitrate performance but for high bit rates, it''s equivalent to MP3.  FLAC is a nice high rate codec though.Eclipse vs. JBuilder Pro ($1000) is one project.  Ignoring cost, you can find a lot of great OSS apps that beat the commercial stuff:GAIM vs. AIMMozilla/Firebox (bird+fox=box) vs. IELinux vs. Windows (very opinionated, depends on intelligence and computer experience)MPlayer vs. WMP/RealOne/QT/PlayaBash vs. cmd.exe (hehe);  I can''t come up with a single example of an OSS replacement for an expensive, mainstream product that is 17x bettter than the professional product.  Equivilent, sure.  Marginally better, perhaps.  17x better?  No.CM ;quote:Original post by Kadesh  ...depends on intelligence and computer experience...Such statements are why discussions like this are doomed to closure.CM ;  Exactly. I could just counter that by saying that maybe Windows users are the intelligent ones as they don''t have to spend so much time configuring the thing or trying to work out how to use the bloody thing first, but I''m beyond that.Oh, wait... ;  I think it''s fine for a company to make a good product and charge for it. I think it sucks when a company makes a mediocre product and tries to lock everybody into using it at unreasonable prices (by patents for example). That''s the sort of behaviour that spawned vorbis. 