jedimasterk wrote:When are Linux developers going to start producing high end professional photo editing applications.
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Linux is truly lacking in this area!!. High End "NATIVE" Professional Photo Editing Applications for Linux, that the professional photographers will use over Adobe products. Like everything in the Adobe Creative Suite CS3!.
I know next to nothing about photo editing, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. However in return for that, let's for the sake of argument say, that such tools got produced, let's call it OpenShop (Creative aren't I? No pun intended), licensed under the GNU GPL and ran on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac, and it could do the same stuff as Photoshop users claim Photoshop can do, and Gimp cannot, and a bit more just to make OpenShop seem that much more irresistible.
I am willing to bet that even in this scenario, the Photoshop users would still find something about OpenShop to whine about, and then say something like "I've already trained my staff to use Photoshop, we can't switch now", "The interface is too different" (When in reality a certain tool might be two centimeters to the right) or "I use Photoshop at work/school/<insert whatever you want here> and I have to use it at home too". And then we're at the point where OpenOffice.org is today! How ... delicious!
You say tools which
"the professional photographers will use over Adobe products", don't exist. A parallel situation to Adobe's dominance in the photo editing market, exists in the office productivity market, where Microsoft is deeply entrenched with Microsoft Office. The difference however, is that there IS a good alternative in that field, it's OpenOffice.org, yet every time it gets mentioned, people always find some little detail to whine about. To add to that, most people who use Photoshop aren't novice computer users (Such as my mother) like the users of Microsoft Office are, so they're even more likely to find details about OpenShop to whine about, so I seriously doubt that Photoshop users would switch to our hypothetical program, OpenShop, even IF it got written, like you claim it currently isn't.
Like Dann said, it's not the free software community's responsibility to produce a clone of Photoshop (Because
obviously Gimp is not good enough! ... /sarcasm), because first of all, what people like you want, is not an alternative to Photoshop (Or even a clone of it), what I'm guessing you want, is
Photoshop for GNU/Linux, and it's only Adobe who can produce that for you. Secondly, even if the free software community produced an alternative to Photoshop (Like we have OpenOffice.org as an alternative to Microsoft Office), I'm convinced that the likelihood of you guys switching to it, are next to none.
If users of Photoshop on Windows, don't want to switch to Windows Vista, once you're being forced to (Microsoft will end sales of XP on PCs quite soon, except for small devices like the Eee PC), and don't want to invest in a Mac either. Well, may the stars help you! Then you can either run Photoshop on GNU/Linux via Wine, bite the bullet and try to use GIMP, or beg and plead at Adobe's feet saying "Mighty Adobe, please port Photoshop to Linux for me!" [1]. And I'm quite sure that for businesses, educational organizations etc., buying second-hand licenses for Windows XP aren't going to be an option, because of the restrictiveness of the Windows EULA.
[1] The ironic thing about this sarcastic example of mine, is that it's really a variant of a statement by Richard Stallman, about what users of non-free software have to do if they want a certain change: "Oh mighty developer please make this change for me".