Comment by SomeCallMeTim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SomeCallMeTim | Hacker News Reader

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The opposite has been the case, though, in practice: When using MIT-licensed software that's popular, proprietary software companies have been happy to contribute back upstream, because it reduces their maintenance requirements.

And since when does a for-pay piece of software eclipse the original free version in popularity? If it did happen, then I'd assert that the "proprietary company" must have done a lot of work to make that possible. In that unlikely case, they must have invested a nontrivial amount in the creation of a powerful tool, and they deserve the profits it generates.

A far more likely scenario is that a proprietary company forks an MIT-licensed project, does something creative with it, sells it to a few people, and then the open-source community would copy the cool features and add them to the MIT project. The actual code to a new feature is typically not as hard to create as the design of the feature, which has already been done by our hypothetical proprietary company. Then the company will need to innovate again to stay relevant, and the free project can copy those features as well.

A healthy ecosystem can include some companies that don't share. It's all part of the network effect. If you can cite any situation where a community surrounding a free software library or other product has been killed or even harmed by a piece of proprietary software that is based on the same code, then you might have a point, but I don't think it's happened.

It DOES happen that proprietary software runs circles around the equivalent free software (Adobe Photoshop, for instance), but that's not because the for-pay software is stealing free code. It's because when you have hundreds of full-time developers you can produce a lot more than the same number of people can do in their spare time. And when those full-time paid developers can contribute to open source (as is frequently the case with MIT/BSD licensed projects), those open source projects flourish as well. Again, see LLVM/Clang.

But all of the examples you cite (with the exception of Photoshop) are used by developers. The article was talking specifically about serving the interests of users of applications.

I actually think you chose a bad example with the Adobe suite. Not one of the creative apps runs on Linux, I need an internet connection to keep the DRM system happy, and I have no guarantee that I will be able to open a PSD/AI/etc that I created 10 years ago on an older version of the software - a major concern for a serious amateur.

>I actually think you chose a bad example with the Adobe suite.

It's actually a perfect example:

* Any DRM it has obviously is annoying and could prevent you from using a valid copy (though I've never seen it not work).

* It's crazy expensive.

* Its UI is annoying.

And yet it's by far the most used piece of software when it comes to editing photos (with the possible exception of Adobe Lightroom).

FWIW, PSD is a pretty well standardized file format, and files created in older versions of PhotoShop have always reliably worked in newer versions of the app. It's the other way around, especially if you're using transformations that don't exist in the older app, where you most frequently encounter problems. Which means that if you don't pay their ongoing extortion fees, you might end up getting a PSD that you can't open because of some new feature the older app doesn't support.

Yes it's annoying. But it's also hands down the best, and no professional graphic artist would be taken seriously without it. Gimp doesn't even come close in functionality -- but even worse, the various tutorials and scripts you can follow or acquire for PhotoShop don't work in Gimp.

>The article was talking specifically about serving the interests of users of applications.

Sure it was, but in my example I point out one of many apps that is vastly superior to its open source equivalents, and yet it is the one that serves users the best. Yes Adobe extorts money from those users. Yes it would be nice if it were just open and free. But the reason that Adobe can make software that is so much better is that it can extort that money from users.

So what good is the GPL in fighting apps like this? It accomplishes nothing with respect to large companies like Adobe, because they can just pay to reimplement what they need.

The argument is that the GPL will allow better software to be written with capital-f-Freedom than proprietary. That the GPLed libraries will grow in quantity and eventually outcompete proprietary tools. Other than developer tools (and precious few of those even qualify, honestly), name a GPL application that's better than its closed source rivals. Write a list of all of them that you can think of, in fact. If you hit a half dozen, I'd be surprised -- and there are dozens if not hundreds of solid proprietary packages that make the open source packages look embarrassingly bad by comparison.

Yes you can find GPL apps that are Good Enough for some purposes. I do know people who use and swear by Gimp, for example, or Inkscape. But except for people who use Free tools for philosophical (or financial) reasons, the vast majority of end users want the mainstream, proprietary software that for the most part works the way they expect.

Users are being better served by apps that work well and have the features they need. It happens those apps typically are proprietary. Some philosophies sound good on paper, but in reality fall apart. The GPL largely falls into that trap, IMO, except for the awesome developer tools that are available for free. And Firefox. I still like Firefox. :)

I'm sorry but PS is not vastly superior to Gimp; it's largely equivalent. PS has tools that Gimp doesn't have and Gimp has tool that PS doesn't have. Given the choice, I use Gimp over PS because of the reasons I mentioned in my previous post, and also because I find its UI to be much less obtrusive, and because I can't find equivalent tools in PS for the work I do.

I deliberately avoided comparing the 2 apps in terms of features in my last post to avoid the tit for tat that will inevitably follow.

PS is required by professionals because it is the de facto standard image editing tool and it's the one graphic designers learnt to use in school, and because once you've bought a copy you're locked in. Frankly, if XCF was the industry file format and Gimp was taught in school, Gimp would be the tool everyone uses.

I've used both, and Gimp falls flat in the implementation of the features that it does have. It's not about filling in boxes in a feature comparison table. It's about how well each key feature works. [1]

And that's where most open source software completely falls down, because getting UI and polish into an app takes tons of time and experimentation to get right. Open source apps typically get to 80% and leave it there. Problem is, the last 20% of UI and feature improvement typically requires 80% of the time.

But even that is irrelevant, as you point out, because PS is the de facto standard, and Gimp can't open a multi-layer PSD and be expected to render it perfectly if it uses any nontrivial effects.

[1] Gimp seems to still be missing "adjustment layers," which I swear are used in 95% of the nontrivial tutorials I've seen for PhotoShop. I'm sure you can work around that, but that is a key feature of PhotoShop. Just because you don't find a feature important doesn't mean it isn't used by 90% of graphic professionals who use PhotoShop.

    I've used both, and Gimp falls flat in the implementation
    of the features that it does have.

I've also used both, regularly and for many years, and my experience is the opposite. As I keep saying, Gimp's UI and portability is what makes me keep using Gimp despite also having Adobe CC installed on my workstation.

    And that's where most open source software completely
    falls down, because getting UI and polish into an app
    takes tons of time and experimentation to get right.

I could just as easily say that this is where proprietary software falls down because software vendors sell their wares on features, not polish. As a professional software engineer, I know this first hand. PS continues to get feature after feature but its basic rectangle select tool is still a complete pain to use. Last time I checked, the Gimp team flat out refused to add support for 3D rendering. It took them along time to come round to the idea of adding vectors.

Actually, if you look at Gimp's development history, you will find that their approach for a long time now has been to work very hard on making the features they deliver as powerful and usable as possible.

This is partly why features are added so slowly. The other reason is because the development team are a handful of people who work on the tool in their spare time.

Yet despite this, they have built an excellent image manipulation tool in Gimp itself, they've developed the GTK+ UI toolkit that is the backbone of the excellent Gnome and XFCE desktop environments and countless applications. They've also developed the excellent GEGL library, the non-destructive rendering engine built precisely to enable adjustment layers (or their equivalent) in Gimp that you can't live without, which in the meantime has enabled the rapid development of Darktable, a very capable alternative to Lightroom.

In a futile attempt to keep this conversation on topic, I'll just point out that both GEGL and GTK are licensed under the LGPL, while Gimp and Darktable are both licensed under the GPL.

    Just because you don't find a feature important...

That's got nothing to do with it. I started working with Gimp because it was the only tool that ran on Linux that was capable enough to do what I required.

A user of a tool like Gimp or Photoshop makes the application work for him. Before adjustment layers existed, Photoshop users duplicated layers and blended them with the original to get the flexibility they required. I do the same in Gimp. As Gimp introduces more powerful features, I will take advantage of them.

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