[geocar]

You should feel guilty! You sounded extremely entitled there. How do you feel when someone asks you -- goads you really, into working for "exposure" instead of your usual rates? It's more than a little insulting!

If you want Free Software to be different, change it. If you don't know how now, like with anything else, you can learn how, or you can pay someone who has already spent the time to learn. The gimp project has a page where you can easily reach out to developers working on Gimp and fund them directly. If you think this feature is important, you should reach out and find out how you can help make it happen.

Now I don't work on gimp, but I do make Free Software, and I think most of us who program Free Software aren't working for "exposure". We aren't excited to be "used" by "users", and so of course we do not do anything "user driven". We do stuff because we want to, and when we don't want to, we may want-to for money. Like everybody else.

[totalkrill]

This is very true. It should really be more understood, that open source developer are basically sharing their hobby and what they create with others on their terms, not their users....

Imagine someone building furniture in their free time because they enjoy doing so, and then offers to give it away for free. You see this offer and now have two polite options:

1) decline, because you do not like it

2) accept because you do like it

I have never understood the people who take the third option:

3) complain that the furniture is not to their liking, and then demand that the person builds it to his/hers specification and then give it to them. Free of charge, because that was the original offer right?

[oblio]

The Open Source community does the opposite, that's the issue.

Every time there's a push for commercial apps on desktop Linux, you have a bunch of rabblerousers throwing dirt at said devs. "They should make it Open Source! Micro$oft paid them off"

You can see it in every Linux forum.

At some point Linux distributions should just admit defeat for this kind of software, recognize that the Gimp and co. are just hobbyist software, and accept the real world and endorse commercial software for these use cases.

Instead every time this kind of discussion happens, someone compares a kiddie toy truck (Gimp) to a 10 ton semi (Photoshop).

It's really a shame when true commercial quality Open Source software exists out there, such as Blender.

[geocar]

> It's really a shame when true commercial quality Open Source software exists out there, such as Blender.

That might be because the Blender users banded together and bought Blender[1] (with the help of one of the authors IIRC)

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20021010045558/http://www.blende...

> At some point Linux distributions should just admit defeat for this kind of software, recognize that the Gimp and co. are just hobbyist software, and accept the real world and endorse commercial software for these use cases.

Aren't they already doing that? I think commercial software has been targeting Linux almost since it came on the scene, simply because it made eval easier. Ubuntu distributes lots of nonfree stuff. If you count the enterprise (and perhaps depending on how you count that), I think it's possible more commercial software runs on Linux than on any other operating system.

But I can certainly agree there just isn't very much good commercial Linux desktop software. Do you think it's possible perhaps too many Linux desktop users consider price to be the biggest reason they use Linux (or assume, reading comments like that online that most users anyway) and so there just isn't any money to be had?