>And exactly why wouldn't designers and illustrators pay (read: devote resources) programmers to improve it, just like they do now? If your claim is that people

>And exactly why wouldn't designers and illustrators pay (read: devote resources) programmers to improve it, just like they do now? If your claim is that people don't pay for OSS development, my paycheck says otherwise. No, my claim is that people don't generally pay directly to support OSS development, and never in the scale of supporting huge teams of programmers, equipment, testing, etc like Adobe does. There are very few examples of people in a field paying directly for OSS programmers to create programs for their profession. Don't conflate a company paying for OSS software or employing programmers working on OSS (like Sun, Oracle, RedHat, IBM etc), with "people" and specifically graphic professionals paying programmers to create OSS graphic editing programs. (The one counter-example I can think of, Bender, was closed source, and not doing very well financially when people sponsored it's becoming OSS). Heck, GTK+, the very toolkit used not only by Gimp but by a huge ecosystem of programs, is left with ONE programmer working on it (he posted a complain a few months ago).