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I don’t mean to be snarky but you really just get what you pay for. A lot of FOSS is produced by people for fun, to solve a specific problem they have, or to le

I don’t mean to be snarky but you really just get what you pay for. A lot of FOSS is produced by people for fun, to solve a specific problem they have, or to learn/play around with some technical concept. Unsurprisingly, people don’t want to do the unfun things like deliver a UX that’s intuitive even for those who don’t work in the thing, or handle support, or play TL/EM/PM with randoms on GitHub.

Gigachad 3y ago
I feel like my optimism for FOSS software has slowly degraded to nothing. GIMP will literally never replace Photoshop and the gap between them is only growing. How can a product that's raking in millions of dollars a year ever be replaced by a few people working on it in their free time? When software was simple and if companies were just sitting still without continuing development, maybe. But most companies seem to be full steam ahead pumping everything in to research and development.
- kyawzazaw 3y ago
  Photopea seems to work really well for a decent subset of what Photoshop does.
  - drdg 3y ago
    Never heard of that one, so I was interested and checked it out. Turns out they do have a github repo but it plainly says: "Since Photopea is not fully open-source, this repository serves as a place for bug reports, feature requests, and general discussion." Looks like a nice product, but I would not consider it a FOSS alternative to GIMP.
  - mkl 3y ago
    Photopea is not open source. I think it's still made by just one person, but its ads bring in a lot of money.
- MaKey 3y ago
  There are excellent projects like Blender which proves that high quality FOSS products can be done.
  - opportune 3y ago
    Check out some of the names on fund.blender.org I think a lot of people have this misconception that FOSS is produced by volunteers working for no pay. I mean, they don’t literally think that, but they bucket FOSS produced by amateurs and volunteers with FOSS produced by companies with massive R&D budgets. The only thing those software have in common is that they are free to use and modify as-is. In some cases, FOSS is literally just something a company made to meet their needs (in a way that mostly generalized it) and then decided “hey this would be cool to donate as FOSS.” Blender and Linux are also basically paid software, they are just funded by the many corporations who rely on them. You can’t compare that to abandonware some guy made in his free time or volunteer-produced software that competes against software funded to the tune of billions of dollars per year.
- opportune 3y ago
  I think there are two competing truisms at play when comparing paid software to acceptable-ish FOSS software in the same space. One is that funded software is almost always going to be more polished and easy to use than unfunded software. The vast majority of successful FOSS projects are either funded by corporations directly or by nonprofits which usually are still getting most of their contributions from corporations. True volunteers have no incentive to fix your bug or provide support. Another is software provides diminishing returns the more it’s invested in past the point of viability. That’s partly because 95% of people need from the software comes from a small set of important core functionality, with the remaining 5% coming from everything else, but the 5% differing from person to person. Chasing that last 5% is not only very expensive and time consuming, it adds a lot of complexity and overhead. So there is a lot of FOSS that only solves up to the 95% point because it’s not too difficult and the people maintaining the FOSS have a different 5% than you do. Anyway, it may not be the case that all software will be FOSS any time soon and GIMP will replace photoshop, but I certainly wouldn’t consider GIMP a failure. If you just need something basic and free for some light editing it works fine. It’d be a shame if people with simple needs had no free alternative to expensive licensed software.
  - Cyphase 3y ago
    Related to "the 5% differing from person to person": > A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. > Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release “lite” word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the “word count” feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it’s not there, because it’s in the “80% that nobody uses,” and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ’cause it won’t count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy. Source: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv-bloatware-and-the-8020-myth/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >How can a product that's raking in millions of dollars a year ever be replaced by a few people working on it in their free time? You don't directly compete. figure out a pain point and make your smaller product focus really hard on fixing that pain point. You won't have an industry migrate to you, but you will attract some audience, and maybe that audience can start influencing Adobe to get that into their own tooling. >But most companies seem to be full steam ahead pumping everything in to research and development. well, they were until... March or so. I guess now's a good a time as ever to catch up if that's your goal.

Gigachad 3y ago

I feel like my optimism for FOSS software has slowly degraded to nothing. GIMP will literally never replace Photoshop and the gap between them is only growing. How can a product that's raking in millions of dollars a year ever be replaced by a few people working on it in their free time? When software was simple and if companies were just sitting still without continuing development, maybe. But most companies seem to be full steam ahead pumping everything in to research and development.

kyawzazaw 3y ago
Photopea seems to work really well for a decent subset of what Photoshop does.
- drdg 3y ago
  Never heard of that one, so I was interested and checked it out. Turns out they do have a github repo but it plainly says: "Since Photopea is not fully open-source, this repository serves as a place for bug reports, feature requests, and general discussion." Looks like a nice product, but I would not consider it a FOSS alternative to GIMP.
- mkl 3y ago
  Photopea is not open source. I think it's still made by just one person, but its ads bring in a lot of money.
MaKey 3y ago
There are excellent projects like Blender which proves that high quality FOSS products can be done.
- opportune 3y ago
  Check out some of the names on fund.blender.org I think a lot of people have this misconception that FOSS is produced by volunteers working for no pay. I mean, they don’t literally think that, but they bucket FOSS produced by amateurs and volunteers with FOSS produced by companies with massive R&D budgets. The only thing those software have in common is that they are free to use and modify as-is. In some cases, FOSS is literally just something a company made to meet their needs (in a way that mostly generalized it) and then decided “hey this would be cool to donate as FOSS.” Blender and Linux are also basically paid software, they are just funded by the many corporations who rely on them. You can’t compare that to abandonware some guy made in his free time or volunteer-produced software that competes against software funded to the tune of billions of dollars per year.
opportune 3y ago
I think there are two competing truisms at play when comparing paid software to acceptable-ish FOSS software in the same space. One is that funded software is almost always going to be more polished and easy to use than unfunded software. The vast majority of successful FOSS projects are either funded by corporations directly or by nonprofits which usually are still getting most of their contributions from corporations. True volunteers have no incentive to fix your bug or provide support. Another is software provides diminishing returns the more it’s invested in past the point of viability. That’s partly because 95% of people need from the software comes from a small set of important core functionality, with the remaining 5% coming from everything else, but the 5% differing from person to person. Chasing that last 5% is not only very expensive and time consuming, it adds a lot of complexity and overhead. So there is a lot of FOSS that only solves up to the 95% point because it’s not too difficult and the people maintaining the FOSS have a different 5% than you do. Anyway, it may not be the case that all software will be FOSS any time soon and GIMP will replace photoshop, but I certainly wouldn’t consider GIMP a failure. If you just need something basic and free for some light editing it works fine. It’d be a shame if people with simple needs had no free alternative to expensive licensed software.
- Cyphase 3y ago
  Related to "the 5% differing from person to person": > A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. > Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release “lite” word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the “word count” feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it’s not there, because it’s in the “80% that nobody uses,” and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ’cause it won’t count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy. Source: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv-bloatware-and-the-8020-myth/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>How can a product that's raking in millions of dollars a year ever be replaced by a few people working on it in their free time? You don't directly compete. figure out a pain point and make your smaller product focus really hard on fixing that pain point. You won't have an industry migrate to you, but you will attract some audience, and maybe that audience can start influencing Adobe to get that into their own tooling. >But most companies seem to be full steam ahead pumping everything in to research and development. well, they were until... March or so. I guess now's a good a time as ever to catch up if that's your goal.