14 Apr
2011
14 Apr
'11
7:11 a.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2011 9:34 AM
Subject: Re: Modern source projects (was Re: difference between Quick
Is your argument really that 100% of Photoshop's
esoteric and
rarely-used features are always needed for every job that is considered
"professional" (again, whatever that means), and for that reason, anyone
who attempts to do anything without it is "foolish"? (yes, not YOUR
words, I know)
Seriously?
-Dave
Its been years since I looked into it, but Photoshop had functions needed in
the printing industry (color separation and calibration, some other stuff I
don't recall) that GIMP just did not have or do well. There are many tools
that have a set of paint brushes, 100's of layers of REDO functions etc, but
the integration of the software with manufacturing (first step to end
product) is where opensource tends to fall apart in business. Somebody
editing photos would not need those special functions to crop a pic and even
out the color balance, the crapy software that comes with their scanner or
camera can do that just fine.
If you have noticed some major commercial software venders have caught on to
this and have released free basic tools (NERO burning ROM for one) where
they cannot compete with free stuff like active ISO burner or CDBurnerXP for
basic tasks. Those companies then sell the enhanced software that will do
authoring of DVDs and other special tasks while trying to get the people
using the free stuff to upgrade.
Personally I like having a WELL DOCUMENTED STANDARD file format so you can
use multiple apps to do work and the end user can then use whatever they
need to finish the project. I had problems in the distant past with
converting stuff from different CAD software packages where something always
needed corrected in conversions even simple stuff like fonts (more work and
proofing). It took how many years just to get a standard office suite file
format which should have been simple.
To sum it up when opensource projects end up being the leader instead of
just cloning something popular (95% of the way) then people in business will
take it more seriously. The old phrase nobody got fired for buying IBM
decades ago is like nobody gets fired for buying Adobe Photoshop in the
printing industry these days. And to be honest professionals don't buy
Photoshop, they buy the whole Adobe suite of tools.