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Comment by webuiarchitect | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the noticeable difference is Gimp sucks!!

Hats off to the Gimp development team for pulling off so many features and above all having an open-source product out there. But the problem is PhotoShop has set the expectations way too high. And I'm afraid, a non-commercial product will never be able reach that level.

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Are there any arguments why a non-commercial product (not necessarily Gimp) will never be able to reach "that level"? This looks suspiciously like "open source software is always worse than closed source!!!!!" which has been refuted more than once.

I don't think anyone doubts that for things like OS kernels, database engines, web frameworks, browsers, libraries, editors etc. FOSS software easily wins.

But for end-user applications where you pay for the competition and where the typical end-users are not developers, or similar, (e.g. MS Office, PaintShop, most games) then FOSS versions seem rather poor by comparison.

Have you ever tried MyPaint?

IMO a good example of a software which does its tasks very well (I'm no (digital) painter, but I've heard about graphic artists seriously thinking about switching to it... if it only had a Mac version...).

I agree Photoshop sets the expectations high. But I don't agree that a non-commercial product cannot reach that level. Take a look at Blender.

That's probably not the best example, as Blender was initially closed-source until the creators went bankrupt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)

But it's been open source for 8 years and under active development:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#Development

There can't be a huge amount of the original source left, surely?

Just because Photoshop might have set the bar high doesn't mean the GIMP "sucks!!".

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