I would argue Adobe lost more money from pirated Adobe apps than GIMP
Isn’t this called, “competition”?
Gimp, Paint.Net, VLC…
A little bit of hope for a future more like Star Trek and less like Wall-E.
They did not “lose” any money; they never had it
What they lost is potential customers
Right?
If I had no intention on buying your product, you didn’t lose money.
If I pirate your product, you still didn’t lose any money as I still had no intention on buying your product.
There are probably some people who decided to use GIMP instead of Photoshop, some people who simply pirated Photoshop, and some people who bought Photoshop anyway.
It’s difficult to quantify the degree to which the existence of GIMP caused lost sales for Adobe. I started using GIMP instead of a high-seas Photoshop version, so I still haven’t spent a dime!
The “losing money” argument is the same they use against media piracy.
Oil piracy though, no biggie so long as it’s a big government doing it.
What many people don’t think about is that open source / free software is anti-billionaire software.
Since all software is bits, and it’s free and easy to copy bits, to make money from software, a company needs to build a “moat”. A moat is something that protects your company from people choosing alternatives. Open source software is built without a moat, so that anybody and everybody can access it. And, if you build with the GPL anybody who builds something based on your software is forbidden from building a moat of their own.
This means that it’s really hard to get rich building free / open source software. But, it also means that in any area where there is free / open source software it’s much harder for fully commercial, closed source, for profit companies to make big profits. Enshittify too much and people will just switch to the alternative, even if the alternative is significantly less stable, not as easy to use, is lacking features, etc. Piss people off too much and they might actually invest engineering money on improving the open source alternative.
Adobe is a big company with their fingers in many different pies. Photoshop is only one of their products. Gimp alone can’t do much to hold Adobe back, but it does limit what they can do with Photoshop and still expect to make money from it.
to make money from software, a company needs to build a “moat”.
No. There are other ways.
I’ve paid more for Free Software licensed software voluntarily than I ever did for proprietary software with its moats. Largely because they have no moat.
And has that made the people selling that software rich? No.
My point is that to get rich making software you need a moat. You can still make a bit of money without it, but it will be a fraction of what you can make if you can use intellectual property laws to make sure you don’t have to worry about competitors.
This means that it’s really hard to get rich building free / open source software.
Red Hat, Canonical and others disagree.
Red Hat doesn’t even exist anymore. They’re nothing more than an IBM subsidiary. Canonical is hardly rich. It may be influential in the free software world, but in terms of market cap, they’re half the size of “A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp”. Have you ever heard of A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp? I hadn’t until I started looking for software companies comparable to Canonical.
Meta is probably the biggest example of profiting from open source
Software licensing will eventually be relegated to the “dustbin of history”, hopefully it won’t be after humanity emerges from a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Yeah. Software licensing is artificial scarcity, trying to make the new world of bits seem like the old world of objects so that people who knew how to make money with objects can still make money with bits.
Are not the copyleft licenses the opposite of artificial scarcity, not just affirming that opposite, but also affirming to not impose that artificial scarcity later on, as a condition?
Even permissive licenses start from an absence of artificial scarcity. Even if though later on, forks can add their artificial scarcity.
Yes, that’s the distinguishing feature of the GPL. The ironic thing is that the only thing that gives the GPL its power is the thing it’s trying to fight. If IP laws didn’t exist, the GPL would be unenforceable, but it would also be unnecessary.
I agree that it’s artificial scarcity, but I don’t think the conversation is going to fully be able to move to removing that scarcity until we find a way to handle the people who rearrange the bits actually living in a world of objects and totally authentic scarcity.
It’s the same dilemma we have with authors and musicians. Even if it can be infinitely copied the people who make it still need to eat, and not just be able to find a way to eat, but to reliably and predictably eat which makes donations and crowd funding iffy at best.
As a user and contributer to open source, I’m loath to put up any defense of something that irritates me more often than not. As a person who makes a living working on the closed side I can honestly say I would probably not be in the field if there wasn’t as much ability to make a living in it.
Software patents can fuck off though.
It will probably take something like universal basic income. Also, before copyright etc. a lot of art was created when a patron paid the artist for their work. In modern times, a single individual patron has been replaced by a bunch of them using Patreon. In addition, some people (not enough) are employed to work on open source software. It’s similar to a patron kind of arrangement because someone is paying for the “artist” to work, even though the thing the artist produces can’t be owned by the employer.
I think if you combine all those various things the need for “intellectual property” goes away. But, the people who currently make money from IP are going to fight tooth and nail to keep it.
apocalyptic hellscape
Which is, sadly, where we are right now
Heading there but plenty of room to get worse
If only I was free enough to code the end of software companies.
Adobe didn’t lose money. You can’t lose money you never had.
Have you ever heard of the term “Lost Profits”?
Yes and it’s a made up term right next to my Unrealized Lottery Winnings
Weren’t they the band with the lead singer who turned out to be a paedo?
I put that one right next to ‘Wasn’t good enough’
Because of Adobe’s hatred and abuse of their users, Adobe lost millions of dollars.
Corporate has a strategy to win those customers back, in all such industries, buy out your competition and enter into a shittrust with remaining competitors, agreeing to both maximize revenue rather than compete for favour.
Anti trust has been dead, courts have been captured, customers have no choice, stonk goes back ups.
Amen for the GNU GPL. Changed the world. Gave us an out.
Maybe stonk against megacorps
There’s also Krita if you’re more of an artist
Maybe you mean a more “brush and canvas” interface without complexity and distraction. I’m an artist that uses gimp. They are both great, Krita is just made with ease of use and emulation of irl tools in mind. GIMP can do emulation stuff too, but it can also do tons of other things, even video fx and animation.
GIMP can do […] video fx and animation.
Sounds like feature creep to me tbh.
Jehan Pages, you have bestowed my life with an abundance of badly edited memes and given me a trade that can I be proud of (making badly edited memes in Gimp), thank you.
Adobe hasn’t lost anything, they have tied up “design” for any business use. Its a total monopoly.
Yeah, this is kinda BS.
Adobe don’t care. Nearly every design firm is going to ask you about your Adobe experience, so you can use their Adobe software.
Maybe some of their designers will use GIMP. But that’s like saying your office also uses libre office and Linux. Which is extremely rare.
Design lead here. I know photoshop like the back of my hand, but I also know Pixelmator (Mac only), Sketch and Affinity. All are very nice interfaces, one-time, or major version licenses, and smaller, responsive dev teams.
There are compromises in all software, but my team uses Pixelmator and Affinity because we’re a small company and it won’t hurt their design skills to know more tools besides the Adobe suite.
Gimp for a long time had shitty shortcuts and was quite unfriendly to Mac users (the REAL vendor lock-in in the design world btw). Him is just too slow to load, and ugly to look at, similar but less so with Inkscape.
Big firms might be harder to change, but it’s possibly and there are really good alternatives that Adobe probably worries a little about. Unfortunately they aren’t FOSS for the most part.
GIMP had some shitty shortcuts, sure. But so did PS.
As an example of better shortcuts - you could get a rectangular selection by pressing “r”, which is an example of a very simple and straightforward UI language. You could then adjust that selection with handles without needing any chords or modifiers, zoom in with the number keys or scroll wheel, etc.
You could open a tool, like the colour picker, and switch to a different window without the app going beep and telling you “no”, which is what PS traditionally did.
You could open the app and load an image in 1/10th the time it took for PS to start which made it way nicer to use. When I was using PS I generally left it open all the time because of its sluggish start, which meant it was sitting hogging resources all day.
What I’m saying is that your personal workflow and the general UX of whatever software you’re used to using is always the thing you’re going to use as a point of comparison, and if your expected shortcut is different it doesn’t mean it’s worse.
true that it wasn’t good for mac. I gave up apple/mac and their increasingly shitty overpriced products 10 years ago. Since then Linux has come a long way and so has GIMP. Good enough to kill Photoshop? Not any time soon, but good enough for professional use certainly and good enough for new artists to start on. Install G’MIC and it’s so much better.
Right? I hate the phrasing in this headline. Adobe isn’t somehow “owed” those millions so it’s totally backwards to call that a loss. Fuck that noise.
They’re a business, they should earn their revenue by fostering a healthy competitive environment and then winning through innovation and customer loyalty. Not the monopoly licensing and subscription lock-in BS they’ve been doing for decades.
My kids keep screwing Nintendo. The other day I saw my kid grab a Lego, he slid it on the table and then made it jump over an orange.
I’m waiting for the letter from their lawyers.
All monopolies (including Adobe) should be seized by the workers, and then split into different companies and collectivized by the workers. Seriously!
In the construction world, Bluebeam is a good contender to Adobe.
Still corporate though
For PDF editing, there’s so many good open source products.
Absolutely no reason to be using Adobe just for PDFs. Waste of money.
Which ones do you have in mind, if you don’t mind me asking?
I would LOVE to have a FOSS Bluebeam
Isn’t that for pdf editing?
Yes. Bluebeam Revu can do everything Adobe Acrobat can do (better imo).
Acrobat is still a product of Adobe, which is why I brought Bluebeam up.
I know this thread is about GIMP vs Adobe Photoshop, but OP of this comment thread said that Adobe has a monopoly over every business use. Not the case in the construction world
Ah right, got you.
Bluebeam is so powerful that I feel the way it’s used in some construction companies is like how corporate uses excel. In that it has gone beyond what it was initially intended for and has become the primitive around which they work.
Legend.
A few of the replies here, those making those replies, could do with having someone introduce them to the concept of “put up or hack up”, and getting into a Free Software philosophy mindset, and out of a consumer mindset.
GIMP’s free software. Free to use, study, share and change… You the user are empowered. Even if you yourself lack aptitude (beyond just having never tried), you can still seek the services of others, be it those you pay to implement what you want, or, form a community of like minded individuals with similar needs to be met, and from there, start to make it as you want. These days, even LLMs can help curate the software into forms more suited to your needs. … That is, where that’s not already happened, or where there are reconfigurations you were simply not aware of, because it had not occurred to you to search for such, having been conditioned to stay in the box by the consumer mindset the corporation curated in your mind. It’s refreshing to get out of having your mind curated by the corporation, and into using your mind to curate your software.
Either the user controls the software, or the user is controlled by the software and those who control the software.
It’s a different philosophy. Not just a different platform for you as a “consumer”. You’re not a cash-cow for the corporation, with Free Software. You can contribute. Scratch those itches yourself. You may find others share the same itch. Giving back, is a much more rewarding experience than just hoping daddy corporation will give you what you want while you continue to atrophy your abilities.
Put up or hack up. ;)
some open source projects have very unpleasant communities around them, GIMP is not one of them. very easy to get into and everyone is extremely helpful and friendly.
And giving back comes in all forms. Writing docs, answering questions, helping out new users, fixing bugs, or just spreading the gospel of said FOSS software.
… Y’all should check out Krita.
… Y’all should check out Krita.
MyPaint too.
And others.
Imagemagick’s not to be scoffed at either.
Imagemagick’s not to be scoffed at either.
The ffmpeg of imaging.
I’m so thankful to people like Pages who work hard on free alternatives.
photogimp allowed me to abandon photoshop entirely, I vastly prefer my new adobe free workflow
all adobe needed to do was make one time purchase software and not subscription. The CC model is insane
Look… I like gimp a lot and Jehan is a G.
Adobe has lost basically nothing. Because Gimp is still ridiculously underpowered compared to Adobe Photoshop (let alone the rest of the suite). That is perfectly fine since the vast majority of users don’t need those capabilities. But the people who do (e.g. professionals)? There is really no other choice.
Yeah, that title’s last sentence is just a straight-up lie, lol
I disagree. GIMP and photopea get really slow on larger files that photoshop can handle with stability. I’ve really, really tried to move to GIMP, beyond just learning different hotkeys. I keep falling back to Photoshop.
(Disclaimer: I use Gimp a lot and Adobe not at all)
Tbh, the people who use Gimp and the people who use Adobe are two separate crowds and neither Gimp nor Adobe are the only tools in town.
If I’m not going to pay for a photo editing tool and Gimp would cease to exist, I’d just download another free tool and call it a day.
If I’m a professional relying on Adobe Photoshop, the existence of Gimp does nothing to me. Photoshop plus Lightroom costs ~€25/month. For a private person that’s a lot. For a professional that hardly matters. If I pay €1000+ rent for a studio+office, paying €25 isn’t that big of a deal.
Or to put it the other way round: If our hypothetical professional saves just one hour of work per month due to using Adobe tools over Gimp or another software, it’s cheaper for them to use Adobe. Because time literally is money when you are self-employed.
Do execs really hate him? Competition validates the marketplace and your product. Plus they can afford to develop more features than the open source community can produce in the same amount of time. So they can always argue you are paying for the additional features.
“Professionals” is one of those words, you know, like “consumer” or whatever, that does a lot to hide what’s really going on. I’m a professional who used to use GIMP all the time for my work. I’m not less of a professional because I didn’t like Photoshop, in fact, I used to use PS at previous jobs but gave it up because I prefer the GIMP interface (yes, I’m that person) and didn’t need the other bits. “Professional” just means you do it as a job; it doesn’t indicate what that job is, and different people have different use cases.
poor artists blame their tools.
GIMP’s UI and UX are just terrible. I forced myself to use it for months but it never felt like anything ever got easier to do, it’s just so unintuitive. Nevertheless, I thank the devs for all their work, it’s great great tool
I used PS from v3 (I think?) to CS2 (ish?) before switching to GIMP. I thought the interface was weird until a designer at my job showed me where I was getting confused. So I’ve been a semi-regular G user for the last million years and every once in a while I offer to help my partner with something in PS and honestly I take so long to get anything done because I can’t find it in the PS UI.
Have you tried PhotoGIMP?
Photogimp is just lipstick. There are root design choices that create the problems.
Did you reconfigure it much?
There are preconfiguration packs that make it more like photoshop if you want. Gimpshop I think one is called.
I didn’t, I will check it out but that is still terrible UX if you need to mod the program to make It intuitive
