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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

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...

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...