Personally, I think the argument that "open source is a better way to engineer software" has largely proven to be untrue and FOSS' only advantage has been in protecting the rights of end users (who may also be developers).
On the other hand, Blender hardly operates like the average FOSS community in any way, shape, or form. Calling it a victory for FOSS methods when it's mostly SV-funded and has a heavily dictated direction is like calling Android a Linux victory.
If you’re going to start throwing qualifiers out there it dilutes your point.
FOSS advocate organizations like GNU specifically claim that open source and commercial sales are compatible. The important part is software freedom, where you can access source and modify it to your own needs and redistribute with a permissive license.
It doesn’t really matter that Blender has an opinionated roadmap or that it’s funded in a certain way. The bottom line is that you can obtain, modify, and redistribute the code in a free and open source way.
It doesn’t matter that Firefox has a bunch of branding to remove and pushes VPN subscriptions and such. The code is open source so you can fork it and redistribute so long as you remove branding.
Even if you have qualms with VSCode, it’s still FOSS. The only bit that’s limiting is the Microsoft extension ecosystem. But the underlying code is all free and available and is the basis for multiple popular forks. A large portion of it still represents a FOSS success.
If I buy an enterprise version of Grafana the fact that the community version is the basis of the application is a major benefit to me compared to buying a proprietary solution like Datadog. I can potentially contribute my own enhancements and fixes, I can inspect a large portion of the source code if I have a bug or question about how the application is intended to work, etc.
Long story short, FOSS has room for commercial interests, and is superior to the alternative of lack of source code.
I'm not a FOSS advocate, but I think that's a bit strong. I think it's more a case that they recognized the need for a good user experience, but that never hit a threshold which would move the needle for change to happen with the most popular FOSS. Darktable is probably one of the exceptions here.
I really like Darktable, and it's my go to photo editor, but the user interface really isn't intuitive on first look compared to something like Lightroom. The design choice that editing modules should be ordered by their place in the pixel pipeline is logical and sometimes useful, but it ends up with a lot of the controls being in rather weird places. The customisable quick controls palette would help, if it weren't that simple things like cropping can't be added to it (at least, last time I investigated this - perhaps it's changed now?)
I could have been clearer. I wouldn't say it's the paragon of photo editing, but it's further along in terms of usability. I've seen some normal people who don't want to pay the Adobe tax move to it.
An investigation of FOSS development would highlight a bunch of problems that exist to a lesser extent with other software development. When money is on the table and there is no motivation to keep supporting behaviors that particular contributors favor then feedback shift things. When you're building stuff for "yourself" then that feedback doesn't land the same even if the project owner has aspirations for better UX.
Darktable, to me, and multiple YouTubers who have looked at it...
... falls flat on it's face in the first impression by looking like an unresponsive window, due to the disorientingly light gray color design choices. I also just tried it and of course it's not notarized, meaning that it's almost impossible for anyone to install on macOS, unless they know of the secret button in System Settings. Nope, they aren't there yet.
> I also just tried it and of course it's not notarized, meaning that it's almost impossible for anyone to install on macOS, unless they know of the secret button in System Settings.
I don't understand why you're blaming the Darktable team for that when it's Apple that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to install a program written by someone who doesn't pay them $100/year.
Atleast for the photo/image editing part, GIMP is FOSS and, while it definitely has a learning curve compared to some other software, does a pretty reasonable job
GIMP is a perfect example of how the plot has been lost.
Go to the download page: https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ - A mac user has FOUR equal priority download buttons to decide between, depending on chips and whether you want direct or torrent downloads. That is an absurd decision to put in front of 99% of computer users.
For power users, no problem. But if the objective was ever to be mainstream, this is among the reasons why it isn't. There is just not enough focus on making it easy.
Sounds like an apple issue, there's only three for windows, one being the MS store and most people are used to the idea of app stores thanks to phones.
(I agree it's probably best to deemphasise the bittorrent button though)
It's a website UX issue. If it were an apple issue, every website for apple software would have this problem, and they don't.
Anyway, three equal priority options for Windows is also very bad, from a UX standpoint. Two is bad! The point is that there should be a recommendation. Unless it's fine to send many users away confused, in which case no problem!
Or the phone just does "good enough" processing on its own without the user having to do anything else.
I personally use Lightroom and have Photoshop as part of the same subscription but rarely use it. (And Lightroom can do most of what I need without a lot of intervention other than some cropping on my part.)
GIMP has been in development since 1996, and still can't handle basic features like CMYK; meaning any attempt to reproduce colors on a professional printer is doomed. We're not even talking Pantone yet.
People whined about CMYK until it became irrelevant (print died). I'd argue that GIMP was forward-looking by being digital-first.
The reality is all those GIMP haters can either get over it or enjoy paying increasingly high subscription fees for their increasingly enshittified creative suite subscription.
Well it has non-destructive editing finally this year, for all the claims that it was powerful that I had heard through the years, without it the Gimp was a wimp
I may have to give it a go, is drawing a rectangle still a transformation done on a rectangular selection?
So because I need professional print features, I’m a GIMP hater?
It’s fine if you don’t want GIMP to change to meet the needs of a different group (after all these years I suppose the GIMP team agrees). But to people who want to be paid for their product, this is valuable feedback.
Is Adobe responsive to their customers? Maybe at one point a long time ago. But this just shows the folly of tying your professional life to proprietary tool chains. Adobe's business now is to suck any blood left in their customers's veins while trying to obsolete them through AI intellectual property theft.
Adobe sucks, but I need CMYK to make “dead” print projects, so I got the Affinity suite.
Open source principles are nice but unlike Affinity, GIMP was not made with graphics professionals in mind. I don’t love proprietary formats but it doesn’t matter as much for print projects which have a lifespan and revenue.
People are mourning Affinity because it was a great functional tool with no strings attached. We’ve seen this story before. It’s fine; someone else will step in with an alternative when necessary.
Prior to 2025, Affinity used a
perpetual license model. In 2025,
new owner Canva (which purchased.
Serif in 2024) released a new
version of Designer that
integrates the functionality of
Photo and Publisher into a
singular application, and switched
the program to a freemium model
monetized by artificial
intelligence features exclusive to
Canva Pro subscribers.
I don’t follow. Some of the most popular, highest quality software out there is FOSS. The FOSS community never claimed that FOSS software on Linux would become more popular than free commercial software on Windows.
