> How long will it take before GIMP has usability on-par with Photoshop? Here's the bleak assessment: It's been almost thirty years - If it was going to happen

> How long will it take before GIMP has usability on-par with Photoshop? Here's the bleak assessment: It's been almost thirty years - If it was going to happen, it would have happened already. The economics and development model just don't support the same sort of usability and in-depth feature development work that can be supported within a large commercial software organization. You can also observe this in software like language implementations. Ruby, Python, and Java are all rough contemporaries of each other. They were all released in the early to mid 1990's, and they were all released at approximate technical parity. (Basic automatic memory management techniques and simple/slow bytecode interpretation.) Now, flash forward thirty years. While Python and Ruby are still mostly interpreted, Java has been through multiple generations of increasingly sophisticated runtime implementations, now has first rate GC and JIT compilation to machine code. This is the sort of improvement that can only really be bought by continual long term investment in dedicated engineering. It's what takes to escape local maxima in the design space. If a project can't assemble the resources to do this, it winds up stuck wandering around its current local maxima and maybe making marginal improvements, but never able to break free of the fundamental constraints of its current design. This will remain true unless there's some sort of investment in additional resources, which brings me to my more optimistic assessment. With GIMP (and other open source software), it's at least possible for outsiders to make the investment. It's possible to make a contribution, and it's possible to improve the situation. This can itself be a useful and profoundly enabling aspect of software, particularly over the longer term. (I also think this suggests that open source software should tend to be developed in ways that emphasize the discoverability and customizability of the codebase. It's for this reason that I think open source is the key enabling factor for tools like Emacs.)