>In the 22 years since GIMP started, it hasn't caught Photoshop. I think it's important to look in that quadrant, though. Why does that quadrant exist? In my j

>In the 22 years since GIMP started, it hasn't caught Photoshop. I think it's important to look in that quadrant, though. Why does that quadrant exist? In my judgement, it's beacuse such software requires a large amount of research and time to be devoted to it, and while certain free software projects are able to catch up to it, they are few and far between. The next question to ask is why such development-intensive software is proprietary. In my judgement, the answer to that is because the development must be funded somehow, primarily in the case of programming that funding is wages. Open source/free software business models, while existing, do not have the same return, especially for these sorts of programs (though they do for Red Hat for instance.) So presumably, such software could exist being free software if its developers were already accounted for in terms of wages, so they can spend more time making it. This is where alternatives to capitalism enter - Socialist systems do not have wages, and people have much more free time to pursue their interests, while being sustained by communal production, to which they also participate in part. As such, such development may be possible under Socialism, but not capitalism. There is much less incentive to have proprietary software under Socialism.