Sobotka: Why GIMP is inadequate

And yet that's the understood process for getting problems in FOSS fixed. You submit bug reports. It's not particularly difficult.

The irony here, to me, is that he's complaining about having this opportunity at all. What do Photoshop users do when they think "if only there was a tool to do this" or "damn, it crashed again when I do that" or "why is it so slow when I do this"? File bug reports? Find a programmer to help them? Or sit around and whine on mailing lists and forums and in offices? Do they use their costly paid support calls to let Adobe know, only to be told "we're working on it, it'll be in the next version, and you'll have to buy that upgrade, see us in six months time."

Submitting bug reports isn't a chore - it's a privilege. You get to have your say in how the application improves. Yes, it's time and effort - like voting - but the alternative is to leave the choices to someone else.

I've talked to graphic artists who are still using Photoshop CS3 because CS4 introduced and took away things that made it harder to use. It sounds to me like all progress in proprietary software is not universal gain - just like in free software.

I can see the arguments against cash-for-features, especially if it's "wedge this thing in anywhere because that suits my particular workflow". And yet once again you have that opportunity. I'm sure there are photographers and artists using Photoshop that have paid a developer to have a feature that they then use exclusively in-house. You can do that with FOSS too - there's no need to share the code for that GIMP plugin or feature if you use it solely for yourself. Yet we also have the opportunity for the community of artists to get together to fund features which go into the core of GIMP and improve the whole thing for everyone. That's something you don't really get with proprietary software.

So I feel the 'bug reports required' tag (like [citation needed]) to be appropriate in this case.

Have fun,

Paul