Hacker News Reader

Comment by hitekker | Hacker News Reader

Stories about an eloquent, suave believer enlightening a misguided, clearly-in-the-wrong naysayer may sometimes be true, but never very convincing.

> In this case, I opted to give the fireworks/show. My weapons of choice this time included the unified transform tool, the handle-transform tool, and the warp transform tool

Which prompts the leering, misinformed troglodyte to consider the error of his ways, to "imagine the possibilities". Ahh, man.

Having used GIMP and Photoshop, the practical point of GIMP development, in my view, is to provide a baseline for other graphic editing software: i.e., your product's quality cannot drop below what GIMP offers.

View on HN

> Having used GIMP and Photoshop, the practical point of GIMP development, in my view, is to provide a baseline for other graphic editing software: i.e. your product's quality cannot drop below what GIMP offers.

I think that this is one of the important things that Open Source software does, generally - it provides a steadily rising baseline of functionality that is freely available to everyone.

LibreOffice is another product that's often considered not as good as the leading proprietary product, but as long as it exists and gets better with every release, it will benefit everybody, including Microsoft Office users.

I like that perspective. They're the 'Public Option' that keeps the commercial offerings on their toes :)

Agreed 100%. The best Open Source products motivate and inspire.

I tend to agree with you. GIMP is a very important project in my view because it provides legal, cross-platform access to a baseline of image manipulation tools. The above-and-beyond feature set is fantastic, but not the reason why I love it.

I suppose this isn't directly related, but following the theme of OSS alternatives to commercial software... after being ignorant of the OSS desktop application world for a few years, two cross-platform projects have blown my mind recently with their feature sets and level of polish:

Natron - https://natron.fr/ - Node-based video compositor. I've used it to add some dumb special effects to videos.

Godot - https://godotengine.org/ - Unity-like game engine and IDE with export to all non-console platforms. I've used it to make some dumb games.

Natron and Godot have been added to my bookmarks.

Thank you for sharing, my good man. I will playing with them later to see how the next generation of OSS desktop apps have improved.

It's also a decent, free and Free product in its own right, even if flawed. Just being Free makes it better than Photoshop for me. Calling it the "baseline" is pretty dismissive. It's better than Photoshop in some aspects.

Even if it was the baseline, here's the point of GIMP development: to make it a truly great alternative to Photoshop and similar proprietary tools. Even if you never quite achieve it, even if the target keeps moving, it's reason enough for continuing development.

I didn't take "baseline" to be dismissive, but rather a description of GIMP's venn-diagram overlap with Photoshop. They both make different choices for different reasons, but ensuring that proven useful features eventually land in that overlapping region is a valuable contribution to OSS and proprietary software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com