Software in healthcare. I know one software that is only used because staff high up in the chain knows the owner, but the product is a hot mess from the 1990s in terms of technology, frontend, backend, UI.

education

All of them?

My answer is also every industry. It’s like asking what industry could benefit from collaboration.

Today, I was on a networking event for an industry that is currently heavily looking to adopt open-source collaboration, due to cost pressure. And it was such a surreal experience.

You had dozens of human beings in this room, who all understood that collaboration is good. Who understood that the shared goal of surviving as an industry requires collaboration. Who understood each other as human beings.

But because they collect their paychecks from different companies, you had these stupid infights of “our product is better”, as well as monetization always being prioritized higher than collaboration success.
It did not feel like we were working on a shared goal, and rather like each company was just trying to sell their product. Rather than one solution, there were as many solutions as there were companies, each one pitching their solution as the one solution everyone else should agree on.

Yeah, I don’t know what the moral of the story is. It just felt so incredibly stupid.

Video-conferencing, it’s terrible that most platforms out there aren’t interoperable, and you have to choose which platform to use between businesses, and tough luck if your video-conference room doesn’t support anything else than the one in use within your business.

There are solutions out there to bridge these, or you can buy other hardware kits that claim to support multiple platforms, but that doesn’t help you if you can’t afford to replace those right away.

Every industry would benefit from Free Software (not just open-source software).

Transportation engineering.

While design is performed by a mix of public and private entities, most of the end clients are governments and they could have software developed and made free for use by their consultants.

Any silicon vendors (NVidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Realtek, etc) should have open source drivers / firmware. I can’t imagine what, if any, benefits there are to keeping that secret, and it seems logical that sales could/would increase if people were easily able to adapt them for their use cases.

And also the huge reduction in ewaste by being able to keep smartphones up to date or repurpose them without having to spend years painstakingly reverse-engineering binary blobs that only work with ancient kernels.

Government

heathcare systems like EHRs.

Medical imaging software.

I think that the question of whether an industry would benefit is a hard one. It depends on your perspective and what benefits one is gonna aim for.

I think that if I had to choose one category, I’d do CAD.

So, this covers a wide range of different industries and roles. 3D and 2D mechanical engineering. Chip and circuit board design. Designing 3D objects for 3D printers.

There is open-source CAD software out there, of varying degrees of sophistication and for different purposes. But in general, I kind of expected to stumble into a huge wealth of world-beating software. I mean, it’s a field with a lot of technically-oriented people who don’t mostly compete on the software as their core competency. I could see a lot of people wanting to scratch itches, and the situation to be kinda like it is for mathematics software, with strong open-source entrants. But that isn’t the case. There’s very much usable stuff, depending upon what you want to do. But the big boys in the field are proprietary.

There’s FreeCAD. I use openscad to do code-oriented design of objects for 3d printers. I wouldn’t call Blender a CAD package, more a modeler, though it’s adjacent to the field and there is some CAD-related add-on stuff. There’s QCAD. I don’t know how practical BRL-CAD is today, but it’s out there.