>In the long term, though, I hope that really substantial "user-facing" software gains enough critical mass to become the de-facto standard - for example, Blend

>In the long term, though, I hope that really substantial "user-facing" software gains enough critical mass to become the de-facto standard - for example, Blender or GIMP. In such a scenario, any business that needed an off-the-shelf 3D editor or image editor but also developed in-house software (for example, Pixar) would find it in their interest to patch bugs and generally improve the software that they use, even though they don't sell it. I think this is the Achilles heel of free software. It works well for infrastructure software such as OS and middle-ware solutions but doesn't and cannot work well for end-user applications. When you are working on the Linux kernel you only need to concern yourself with the correctness of your solution. When you build end-user applications it is an entirely different concern, you can have the best technical solution and still fail to address users needs. The moment you decide user needs are a priority, your cost is going to go up and more importantly the community strength is likely to falter because a good chunk are going to feel unrepresented. Whether we like to admit it or not, software developers tend to build products for other developers, no matter how much they try the end result will end up appealing more to developers than the general population. This is illustrated by the weak show of Linux on the desktop, for years they've tried but not much has changed. This also happened with smart phones, some might not remember but one of the first truly exciting mobile devices where the Nokia 770 & N800 internet tablets, they were awesome devices but alas were quickly supplanted once the iPhone made its debut. I think this shows that while those devices were awesome (full linux in your pocket, which geek wouldn't love that?)to us as developer they failed to address the general population's needs. The most successful end-user open source application so far is Firefox and that is because Mozilla is basically a quasi business organization and are able to approach developing Firefox like a commercial product.