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Comment by wyday | Hacker News Reader

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.).

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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?

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