[mixmastamyk]

Given enough resources, floss tools are often best in class. With your short-sighted attitude, Linux, Firefox, Blender, etc wouldn’t exist and we’d all be a lot poorer for it—fully controlled by the Oracles of the world without option.

[carlosjobim]

FOSS tools are usually worst in class for the actual user, with some exceptions. The exceptions are generally dev tools and sys admin tools. Linux is not best in class in anything unless you're a developer or a server admin.

The free market is a much more effective process for getting quality tools for the rest of us. There's nothing short sighted about it. As a professional I pay a fair price for my tools and the developers get a salary so they can continue to improve it. In the sector of image editing and graphic design, Affinity is a perfect example: cheap and top quality.

Open source software will not improve for any end user by more people using it. Only programmers can improve it, and only if they want to. Usually they don't want to, because the users are not paying them.

[cmyk_student]

If those new users report new problems, I think it's helpful for everyone. As an example, I helped add support for importing Adobe's ASE palettes into GIMP. Now that we have this feature, I just got a bug report for improving it. The reporter had a palette with a color model that we didn't have when testing it, and that sample enabled us to fix the import problem.

[mixmastamyk]

As I said, a very short-sighted attitude. Four dimensional thinking is harder but not hard. Also, you don’t seem to get the beer/freedom distinction.

Mobile has been won, “Windows Server is dead” (read on this site many times), many desktop tools are floss now, even M$ is writing them. Your small industry not withstanding.

[carlosjobim]

Short sighted is to believe that future generations can have the luxury of previous generations to live so extremely comfortably that they have ample free time and energy to make open source code (for the benefit of billion dollar companies mostly). I'd rather pay for quality apps, where I know that my money pays salaries for the developers. That is much more sustainable and far-sighted.

And I'm getting much more in return as a customer, where I can actually report a bug and get it fixed or ask for a feature and get it implemented, instead of being told to f myself or fork the code, by some angry free developer.

If normal non-developers don't have software tools that they can use to be creative, then you're just throwing all these people into the bin of being only consumers. Who benefits from that?