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Comment by spv | Hacker News Reader

Adobe's new subscription model for Photoshop, makes it expensive for non-professionals. GIMP looks more attractive now for occasional photo editing.

For Inkscape and GIMP to be a good alternative for Adobe's apps, I think they need to improve on UI a lot. I wonder if there is any umbrella organization which can look after FOSS Design apps like GIMP, Inkscape, Krita etc.

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Adobe's photographer's suite (or something like that), which includes PhotoShop and LightRoom is around ~10$/month. I do not think it's that expensive, as you would need to subscribe for 3-4 years, before you pay same amount as for older versions of PhotoShop.

Yes there are cheaper alternatives from affinity of pixelmator, but from photography's point of view PS + LR are still one of the best, feature rich and user friendly tools for photography.

>Adobe's new subscription model for Photoshop, makes it expensive for non-professionals. GIMP looks more attractive now for occasional photo editing.

As opposed to its $800+ asking price before that? It's now $10 per month for Photoshop and Lightroom, so $120 per year.

The biggest turn off for me about Adobe products is that they certainly used to charge me more (almost twice as much at one point) for exactly the same product that they were selling in the USA.

When what you're buying is a download from the same server, with the same internationalisation and features, that sticks in your throat a bit.

When good enough (for me) competition became available in the form of Pixelmator and Affinity I stopped using Adobe products completely.

Things might be better with the subscription pricing but I don't want to be dependent on Adobe again. For my business I could always claim the price back as an expense, it's more the principle of not tolerating gouging.

IMHO no other US company has been as bad at price gouging EU customers as Adobe.

> IMHO no other US company has been as bad at price gouging EU customers as Adobe.

They gouged Australians even worse!

http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/it-is-cheaper-to-fly...

Upgrade price for Photoshop alone was a lot less. And you could run it for years (forever[1] in fact, if you count emulation), as a lot of people did.

[1] Latest New Yorker Cover was Created in Photoshop 3.0 on Mac OS 7 (http://gizmodo.com/5059533/latest-new-yorker-cover-was-creat...)

Maybe they can start a kickstarter campaign to get funds for it. I'm pretty sure that a better UI would attract a lot of users that now hesitate between using Photoshop or GIMP.

For preexisting OSS, I think it is difficult to get a successful Kickstarter campaign because they cannot really sell something for pledges. Have there been any successful Kickstarter FOSS projects ?

I think Bountysource is better here but for mega issues like UI redesign or GTK3 port etc a campaign may be the right way to go.

Have there been any successful Kickstarter FOSS projects ?

Diaspora was successful in the sense that it got lots of money. It was slightly less successful in delivering on its promises.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-2016-lets-m...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-free-paint-...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-open-source...

Though the reasons it worked for us don't really apply to the Gimp situation.

Found this http://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#arent-you-interested-i...

Turns GIMP developers encourage private campaigns focussed on developing specific features.

Another good article on current state of GIMP: http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/gimp-is-20-years-ol...

http://blog.en.uptodown.com/gimp-20-years/

There is https://freedomsponsors.org/project/130/GIMP

But the platform selection was probably wrong - a lot of people probably was distracted by it.

What platform selection? It's not even remotely related to anyone in the team.

This was https://freedomsponsors.org/issue/78/add-other-samplers-that...

And it worked well enough for this guy. He did as much as he could in the timeframe that he had.

Note that he's not core team member. It was a personal fundraiser.

> I think they need to improve on UI a lot.

This seems to apply to the majority of FOSS projects.

Desktop software can hardly compete with commercial offerings if its developers don't get properly funded.

Paying for consulting services, donations, books and trainings isn't enough for a monthly salary.

Adobe's subscription model certainly excluded a segment of their previous userbase. But some people are more interested in Affinity Designer and Photo than Inkscape and GIMP, despite them being closed source. Designer is available in beta for Windows now, and Photo should be released this fall.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/windows/

The monthly subscription option for Photoshop ended my occasional tinkering with Gimp. When I need it, I buy it for a month ($30) and get done what I need to get done. It really doesn't need to save me much time to pay for itself.

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