Please prove me wrong.
There are no free open source software projects that:
-have a user base in the same magnitude as commercial competitors (or have no competition at all)
-are not predominantly used by programmers
-don't have a paid organization as the main contributor (like Mozilla)
@koos also 7-zip
@aeonofdiscord not so sure of that one. MacOS and Windows zip and unzip straight out of the box, so I think 7-Zip has become a niche application. Don't have any stats though.
@koos it definitely used to be a big deal; the wikipedia page mentions 410 million downloads, which seems like enough to call it successful in terms of mass adoption even if one of its key features isn't such a USP anymore
@aeonofdiscord yes, you're right, what matters is that it at least once was adopted by a large number of users
@aeonofdiscord exactly, I don't think they got to where they are without Sun and Oracle. I use OpenOffice and haven't noticed any big changes since they handed it over.
@koos Oo is stagnant, LibreOffice is where actual development is happening afaik
(the Apache Foundation is where software goes to die)
@koos also I'm not sure Oracle did anything with it either, think they just kinda let it rot
@aeonofdiscord but LibreOffice didn't do any ground breaking changes either—or it went so gradually that I didn't notice, which could speak for them for not making obnoxious updates
@koos if you check the release notes you can see them adding a lot of stuff, but because they don't do the MS Office thing of redesigning the entire UI every couple of years it's not super-obvious (plus there are so many moving parts it's hard to spot a new button here or there)
@koos checking some others just now: LibreOffice (nonprofit foundation) has 120m users, and OpenOffice (Apache) has 200m downloads; even if you crudely add those together they don't really challenge the market leader's 1.2bn installs, but it looks like their growth numbers are strong
(I guess you could theoretically argue that both projects benefit from historic investment by Sun and Oracle, but it could go either way depending on your criteria)