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Actually good free software (Blender, Krita, Musescore, Audacity...) shows the FOSS community has been improving software for decades decades.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article_246jsp/
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.
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.
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.
... 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 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.
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.
(I agree it's probably best to deemphasise the bittorrent button though)
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!
photo-editing software will never be mainstream. I expect a person that works with media to be capable of picking the right download.
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.)
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.
I may have to give it a go, is drawing a rectangle still a transformation done on a rectangular selection?
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.
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.