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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Isn't proprietary software nice? It doesn't work well, you have to pay for it, and you are legally prohibited from fixing it.

Sounds like a great deal.

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And yet I'm not flocking to the Gimp download site, why not?

Because you've convinced yourself that you need some feature it doesn't have.

So instead you pay $900 for something that doesn't work right either, and then you "make fun of me" on a social news site.

Clearly you win!

GIMP vs. Photoshop isn't just about features. It's about polish.

I don't think I'll be able to convince you of this, but proprietary apps are usually more polished than the open source counterparts. I'm talking about every sense of the word polish: usability, reasonable bug levels, compatibility, etc.

It's not that open source is bad. It's that for-profit software companies pays programmers to polish the apps in such a way that open source programmers aren't intrinsically motivated to do (real usability testing, compatibility, etc.).

The GIMP still lacks full CMYK color model support.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CMYK_support_in_The_GIMP

That makes it unsuitable for working on anything that's going to be printed.

It's that for-profit software companies pays programmers to polish the apps in such a way that open source programmers aren't intrinsically motivated to do

You say this like it's a fact. Could you cite a source?

(I like your "compatibility" argument. The other day, we received some Word documents that crashed MS Word. OO.org opened them just fine, and the version exported from OO.org didn't crash Word anymore. Clearly Word is more polished, which is why it segfaults on invalid input.)

> Could you cite a source?

Like a research paper? No, I'm afraid not. All I can provide are similar anecdotes like you provided (except for the opposite argument).

Please, Word and Photoshop. Don't put them in one bed, ok?

..proprietary apps are usually more polished..

Well if they weren't they'd already be dead & you'd only know of the open source version. It usually takes a different business model (eg opera), or microsoft to prop up an inferior proprietary product. And opera's pretty much dead.

I think you are correct in that commercialization can put on the finishing touches needed to sell a product.

But that doesn't mean it has to be a proprietary commercial product either. See MySQL, Firefox, SugarCRM, etc.

In my experience, MySQL has gotten more buggy and less stable over time.

That's the work of paid _designers_. Graphic designers, user interface designers, interaction designers. How much respect get those people in open source project land? How much art school students know what the heck "open source" even means?

I paid around $150 for Jasc's Paint Shop over five years ago. It gave me 90% of the features of Photoshop at around 15% of the price.

It's worked fine from day one through to today and I've not had to torture myself with mysterious config file adjustments every time I upgrade my o/s.

The hassle saved has been worth every penny.

The problem is that 90% of the features is not good enough much of the time. I am not a designer but I know enough about design to know that getting the last pixel right is often 90% of expertise. It is a different world from software.

Maybe it's that The Gimp has an even worse interface? I'm an amateur, and I can at least comprehend Photoshop. The Gimp terrifies me.

Pixelmator's got the sort of interface I wish other image apps had. That's my standard, and it's payware.

I've also used both, and they are both incredibly confusing.

I'm going to blame myself for being ignorant, though, rather than insisting that the software is the problem. Clearly it's not.

Why not? Software should be made for the user. Any image editing software that punishes you for never having used it has a problem. It also means that there's a market for an easy image editor that effectively lets users do what they want to do. (That's Aviary's goal, largely.)

That's what Photoshop Elements is for. The idea Photoshop does not have a well-designed UI because the learning curve is steep is ridiculous. The "user" that Photoshop is made for is the professional designer or photographer. There's plenty of room for lower-end consumer products, but there's nothing wrong with the Photoshop UI.

I've never used Photoshop Elements before. Perhaps you're right.

I don't hate Photoshop's UI. (Where was I critical of it?) I dislike the Gimp's user interface very much.

Because Adobe has money to market their products, the Gimp does not.

Most users don't care for fixing it - they just want something that works. Most users are not programmers either, and those that are probably have other issues making them busy.

So the ability to fix broken is not really a benefit for most users. It's an enabler for those that can.

As for not working well, that can be said equally well for both Open Source and proprietary software. Equally, I can pick examples of software that works well from both types.

The biggest benefit for most users is that Open Source is free (as in beer). Firefox only hit the mainstream because it's free and was rock solid. Opera was for a long time rock solid but not free and that didn't help it, did it?

Imagine a pipe in your new house sprung a leak. You contact the builder, but they don't answer your calls. Dammit, you need it fixed now!

So you go into the phone book and hire the first plumber you see. He comes over, fixes the pipe. Sweet!

Except now, two months later, the builder [i]does[/i] answer your call. And when you tell him you got the pipe fixed by someone else, he slaps a lawsuit on you, saying you're not allowed to disassemble or reverse engineer your house.

I think the biggest benefit for users is that you are free to do what you want with the software. You can get plug ins, pop it on LiveCDs, share it with friends, anything. Yes, "freedom" may not be a great piece for marketing, but when it comes to a users true benefits, freedom is the best thing Open Source has to offer.

I know I'm walking into a field of landmines in replying to this, but I'll try to tread carefully:

The plumber/pipe metaphor is better suited to consulting & custom corporate apps. For wide-release software (like Adobe's software) it's in the company's best interest to fix bugs and keep the user happy.

And I think pierrefar made a good point. The only reason I use Firefox is that it's a higher quality than IE and Opera. This might be a result of the openness of the software, but the openness of Firefox wasn't the deciding factor when I started to use it.

[quote]but the openness of Firefox wasn't the deciding factor when I started to use it[/quote]

Of course! That's exactly what I meant. Freedom is not a great marketing fact. Being Free is.

I think reliability in terms of (long-term) availability is also a big plus for OSS.

So the ability to fix broken is not really a benefit for most users.

These users can pay someone else to fix the software. With proprietary software, that's not an option either.

Moreover, only one person needs to pay someone to fix it, and everyone benefits. What goes around comes around.

Unless the cost of fixing the problem is higher than what any one person is willing to pay, so it never gets done (collective action problem).

If not one person on the Earth cares about solving the problem, it is probably not that important. (Uh oh, here comes a rant about global warming and overfishing.)

Avoiding the point, you assume that every problem can be solved by one person.

Global warming and overfishing!

Most "user" open source software sucks a hell of a lot. I am currently having a running battle with xcircuit.

This program is supposed to draw circuit diagrams, yet it saves it in PS format! It manages to fuck everything up. The user interface and everything about the program is unbelievably bad.

Most open source software without a large market share is like that. It is unfortunately the OS mentality.

And don't even get me started on the entanglement of all the software packages. If I download a program to install on Windows it install. For linux the program depends on 120 other packages (a type of incestuous package relationship)

So far my experience with xcircuit makes it more or less comparable with gschem. I really like the fact that its save file is PostScript. (It doesn't lose anything when you save in that format!) The UI is really not discoverable at all, but in my experience the same thing is true of QCad, AutoCAD, and other software that does similar things, whether free or proprietary. There's a good xcircuit tutorial, and the non-obvious UI is actually pretty quick to use once you get used to it.

What schematic capture program do you really like, and what is its UI like?

"I really like the fact that its save file is PostScript."

Yes - it creates larger postscript files.

"non-obvious UI is actually pretty quick to use once you get used to it."

For some reason xcircuit adds extra pages without any warning - which forces you to edit the .ps file by hand.

The wires also does not "connect" (i.e. when you move a component).

The best would be Orcad with ps export.

>> and you are legally prohibited from fixing it

Ah, ok. Dear Programmers, pleeeazee write me a Photoshop 5.0, a Quark XPress 3 and a Freehand 4 Clone in your spare-time without financial compensation. Thanks.

The same thing could have been said about Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python, PHP, Rails, Firefox, etc, etc, etc.

Open source runs the web. Don't make the mistake of thinking that open source == programmers writing hobby apps in their spare time.

Cool, open source runs the web. Why? I guess one reason is that LAMP & Co are actually better performers than their commercial counterparts? Well, open source production software for the content creation industries as it exists today, sucks.

That might be true, but that's not what your comment communicated, to me anyway. To me, your comment communicated (rather snidely) that it's ridiculous to think that a bunch of programmers could create open source versions of the apps you listed in their spare time without financial compensation. All I was pointing out is that a lot of other software sectors have made the same mistake, and I don't see anything about content creation software that makes it immune to the same forces.

He does have a point, although he's been so busy being a jerk that he hasn't communicated it particularly effectively.

Software like Apache, Perl, Postgres, and so on all make the lives of software developers easier. When I spend time working on a project like that, it brings something I'm being paid to do closer to completion, or makes future paid work more lucrative. (I can charge the same amount, but it won't take me as long, etc.)

I don't have the same incentives to make a Photoshop clone, though, because my interaction with graphics manipulation usually consists of an email like "here are the graphics" from the graphics department. I don't care if Photoshop doesn't work, it's not my problem.

That said, I do edit my photos with Gimp, and I think it works great. So again, there is no incentive for me to improve it, I think it's fine already.

I don't see anything about content creation software that makes it immune to the same forces

I don't either, but empirically you have to concede that open source hasn't succeeded in the content creation domain. The closest thing is OpenOffice, and that's the least creative end of the spectrum, just one step away from databases and other back-end software.

If I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's because programmers don't understand the domain. You can't create good graphic design software without graphic designers on the team.

> ... and I don't see anything about content creation software that makes it immune to the same forces.

I'm a graphic & user interaction designer. About 4 years ago, I volunteered to help fix Drupal's UI problems. Everybody was like "Yay! UI help!"

I started by offering a new theme and giving feedback on the arcanity of the calendar API.

Result: no changes were ever made. None of it ever went anywhere, because the weenies prefered to argue on the mailing list about every single point rather than concede that somewhere, something might need to be better.

I gave up. I never volunteered for OSS again. It's not worth it.

If you haven't written it, you don't really need whatever feature you are complaining about not having.

Let the downmods begin!

Fair enough. Ok here is the most important stuff, sorted by program category.

Photoshop 5 This is a standard in forms of UI. What sequences of movements are necessary to get results. Like DJing or vim. The Gimp is absolutely horrible in that regard and completely ignores what the absolute majority of professional graphic designers are used to.

Font handling under X in general is pretty weak.

Color management has to work.

Vector Grafx

Inkscape is pretty good. But in some ways not good enough. It crashes to often with heavier files. But ok. I actually use it but would like to have Freehand back, UI again. Inkscape would be nice as native Mac App, yes, for UI reasons. UI is pretty important because it drives workflow, speed, productivity.

Quark 3 Was a classic. Everything about it was done right. Again, main thing the UI. Font inspector. Main window resizing. How to create new pages, how to link Texts. It was dam fast, with hundreds of pages open and links to database full of graphics. Doing a magazine in real production time with any of the OSS alternatives? Bad idea.

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