How to build an open-source alternative to any proprietary software

I want to start a discussion about how we can systematically identify commercial products that would benefit from open alternatives, and what specific technical and community gaps need closing for each. The goal isn

The main challenge with building open-source alternatives is actually not the technical implementation but the economic structure of the existing market — you have to account for network effects that favor incumbents regardless of code quality and consider whether your project will be maintained by a community or just end up as a fork nobody touches after six months. I found this particularly relevant when I tried to build my own markdown editor from scratch back in 2016 because I hated the bloat in Obsidian but then realized that the actual problem wasn't the software quality it was that I hadn't accounted for plugin ecosystems and collaboration features which are where all the real value lives. This actually reminds me of a summer I spent working at this tiny typesetting shop in rural Maine — we did books exclusively with TeX and LaTeX because there just weren't any other viable options locally, and watching how those workflows evolved over decades showed me that open-source tools succeed not when they outcompete proprietary rivals but when they become the foundation of a whole culture rather than just a single product. So my advice would be to ask yourself first whether you are trying to solve an engineering problem or a distribution problem because most projects fail on the latter and the fix is almost always community building infrastructure like CI/CD pipelines, documentation that doesn't assume prior knowledge, and some kind of governance model that gives contributors ownership rather than just permission.

Good framework for this -- cloning existing workflows is usually where most projects fail before they start.