You see the reason personal computing exists is because it was people who wanted this level of control and "their own computer" started using these cheezy "calculator chips" to build their own computers. What they could do was a lot less than what the mainframes/minicomputers/workstations could do but you could own your own.
All of those things are still true.
But there is a rub. Today you can go on some warez forum and get a cracked Adobe CSx suite and run it on your machine at home. That feature goes away, Your only option is to run Gimp, and if it doesn't have features you need, then you get to write new features yourself because, well its open and you have the source code.
So the world will change, it always does, but the ability for engineers and hobbyists to have their own computers that do exactly what they want them to do, that won't change.
Surely you must understand that the intersection of people that want to run graphical manipulation software and have the time and expertise to work on the GIMP codebase is rather small?
Sure, the Steve Wozniaks of the world have always had the ability to write their own GIMP plugins or whatever, and you're right: that hasn't changed.
But there were a few decades there where the rest of the world could actually own commercial software, and that had a lot of upsides. Those days are drawing to a close.
(Yes, I know that EULAs attempted to "license" software to you instead of truly letting you own the software. But for all practical purposes, you did at least own it to the extent that it would continue to work even if the software vendor's servers went down, or they decided they didn't like you using their software, or your government decided they didn't like you using the software vendor's software, or whatever.)
Even so, in this scenario lots of people will discover that GIMP is good enough and so its popularity will rise, interoperability may become better and more people will take an interest in working on it.
Photoshop piracy was the worst thing that ever happened to the GIMP.
If your vision of how people can continue to own their data in the future relies on GIMP being improved to the point that's not unbearably painful to use, you're failing to reassure anyone.
...or use most classes of non-destructive adjustment layers. Or use many of the more desirable and time-saving (read: cost-effective, even when compared to "free as in beer" plugins. Gimp isn't useless by any means, but it's not a Photoshop replacement yet, any more than Corel's Paint Shop Pro is. (But it will be soon, right? It's been "going to be" for a very long time.)
The problem with GIMP isn't its featureset, but its interface. It's so foreign to anyone who works with graphics that whatever UI metaphors it uses fail to resonate with people, so they just end up confused.
What GIMP probably needs is an overhaul that copies what Photoshop does. People understand Photoshop, and it's the industry standard.
(Also, the team itself have said in various ways that they'll never have as their goal to be a "Photoshop clone", as I understand it that's an unreachable and thus depressing goal. It's a lot more motivating to simply try to make something that works well than trying to cater to every whim of those who don't want to pay for Photoshop.)
They may look superficially similar, and at a high level have the same tools, but from a fundamental workflow point of view there are too many things that are just very different (non-destructive editing, smart objects etc).
the team itself have said in various ways that they'll never have as their goal to be a "Photoshop clone"
And that would be fine and if they'd done something unique or innovative with the UI and really made it their own. Unfortunately they didn't and they're stuck looking kind of like a half-baked Photoshop clone. And as long as that is kind of what they look like, then that is how they'll be judged.
It's foreign to photoshop users, GIMP is just different. I really don't like those open source software that want to copy some proprietary one. They tend to copy the mistakes of the other software too. Maybe GIMP doesn't have all the features that photoshop has but copying photoshop is not the way to go.
Photoshop's interface is awful, and the reason you like it is because you're used to it. GIMP should spend absolutely no time in imitating its mistakes.
Of course, we're offering zero evidence that either position is true, just bald assed assertions. That I vastly prefer multi-window is my only evidence.
>People understand Photoshop, and it's the industry standard.
They've been trained to. It's as intuitive to you as the way home from work. It's as intuitive to me as the way to your house from your job.
> That I vastly prefer multi-window is my only evidence.
That's ironic, given that the latest Gimp (2.8) defaults to a single-window interface. I'm having a hard time adjusting, but this doesn't mean it was a bad idea.
Agreed, GIMP is a horrendous piece of software. I know it is extremely powerful (for example combined with G'MIC) but the fact you can't do the most simple transformations (rescale, move, strech and rotate) on the freehand tool speaks a lot about its usability.
Inkscape on the other hand really is a viable alternative to Illustrator.
Every time I try Inkscape it has been a big disappointment. It doesn't come close to old versions of Freehand, not even speaking of current Illustrator. Even indie devs like http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/ do a lot better job at illustrating.
"Surely you must understand that the intersection of people that want to run graphical manipulation software and have the time and expertise to work on the GIMP codebase is rather small?"
Of course I do, and those people will be faced with an uncomfortable choice, suffer the 'free' tool or pay for access to the 'non free' tool. And the people who run the 'non free' tool will use that money to pay engineers to improve it. And the engineers working on the 'free' tool will do so without remuneration or reward other than knowing they built something they like.
- What about when Adobe makes a change when going CS2 => CS3 that I don't like, or that is detrimental to me? If I 'own a copy' I can just continue using it. With 'CS in the cloud' I have to upgrade because that's what Adobe wants.
- To step outside of software for a second, what happens when (e.g.) George Lucas decides that the "special edition" version of Star Wars is the 'real one' and replaces all cloud copies of Star Wars with the special edition version?
> To step outside of software for a second, what happens when (e.g.) George Lucas decides that the "special edition" version of Star Wars is the 'real one' and replaces all cloud copies of Star Wars with the special edition version?
Yes, this is huge. The cloud is making our culture ephemeral.
Just yesterday I was playing Escape Velocity Nova, a video game back from 2002. It's an excellent game, and since its initial release, people made tons of mods to it. I heard that Eve Online pretty much copied their story.
I'm pretty sure that if this game was made in a "cloud version", as a service and not a downloadable product, I wouldn't be able to play it today. I couldn't enjoy the story, I couldn't live through experiences that influenced the gaming culture ten years ago. It wouldn't make any economical sense for current copyright owners to maintain such abandonware. It would just disappear into oblivion, like most SaaS startups do after a year.
With CS in the cloud' I have to upgrade because that's what Adobe wants.
Not that I'm a supporter of Adobe's cloud strategy, but as of the past 6 month or so you have a choice between using the current version and the previous version. We'll see when the next version comes out if they'll only support two versions or if they'll let you chose any previous cloud supported version.
There are people still running PS6 because it suits their needs. That can't happen in the cloud. Well, it can, but Adobe is unlikely to enable this to happen.
Sure, but you then end up with two entirely divergent software ecosystems.
As it stands two people, one of whom uses Linux/LibreOffice/GIMP and another who uses Windows/MS Office/Photoshop are able (bar some possible formatting issues) to share data and collaborate together because they can share files via dropbox or USB dongles.
Once Photoshop and Office move entirely to the cloud there will no longer necessarily be "files" to share.
That is true, and to the extent that those cloud applications don't use an open interchange standard you won't be able to share documents with them. Having lived through this from before[1], it isn't as dire as you might imagine. What happened last time is that it forced a lot of interchange formats. Will be interesting to see if it does that again. All of the market forces are still there, person A wants to send a document to person B, etc. Of course everyone can send HTML or RTF documents like they do today.
[1] Intel used MultiMate for its documents (as did a bunch of lawyers) while nearly everybody in the tech space was using Interleaf. Xerox was trying to be the paperless glue for the middle. We got PostScript out of it, which was an interesting compromise.
The difference here is that you actually had a copy of the data. If the vendor (e.g. Microsoft) decides to lock you in, they will keep the data in the cloud, with their app being the only access point. Then, locally you will only have a copy of "application state" at any point in time.
Not totally divergent - those of us who are able to maintain our own PCs will have the best of both worlds. We'll be able to use either our own local apps, or the cloud ones.
Most people will prefer the managed computing experience provided by the cloud, and that's a good thing. I've had to ask "so did you keep backups?" with a sinking heart; and heard "My computers running really slow - can you have a quick look?" too many times.
>We'll be able to use either our own local apps, or the cloud ones.
Not necessarily. Chromebooks are already locked down so that any modification of the software on them means DRM video support is disabled. Its only a small leap from video DRM to software DRM. This will probably be sold to users on the basis of security - we won't let your machine log into your photoshop account to steal/delete your photos if it has been compromised.
I realize that I'm going to be a bit pedantic here, and it is not an argument I would support, but your statement *"Contrast with files, which I own ..." which is only true in a limited sense. If you have a book, in a file, which is stored on your device for your Kindle app, Amazon will tell you that you don't own it, what you "own" is a right to view it in the Kindle app for as long as your maintain your side of the agreement and Amazon doesn't feel like using one of their escape clauses.
Now I completely get how crazy that makes people, who argue "I paid money, I got this thing, I own it." but the only reason that it is in a "file" today is because Amazon hasn't figured out how to give you access to it without giving you a file. Nothing in the Adobe announcement changes anything, except that it provides for them, what they consider to be a better implementation of their rights management paradigm. Again, I don't condone or support it, but it's important to note that their thinking hasn't changed, only their implementation has. This also helps them to avoid you reverse engineering their files which they don't like because it allows you to circumvent their rights management tools. Again, I don't condone or support, just report.
So what may happen here is that something which has some value to a person, will be put outside their reach behind a price they are unwilling to pay. I understand that this situation sucks, but on the positive side it adds energy to the 'free' side of the equation because if there really is value there, it is only extractable if stealing is less easy than paying, and paying is at a market price that can support the energy of making it available. That price may be in programmer hours, not necessarily in dollars.
> the only reason that it is in a "file" today is because Amazon hasn't figured out how to give you access to it without giving you a file. (...) but it's important to note that their thinking hasn't changed, only their implementation has
Yes, I understand that and I agree with you here. I'm not complaining that they changed their thinking; I'm saying that their thinking sucks (for the user), and that the more they improve their implementation details, the worse-off we (users) are.
> So what may happen here is that something which has some value to a person, will be put outside their reach behind a price they are unwilling to pay. I understand that this situation sucks (...)
This suckiness is what I'm complaining about.
I need to think about it more to come up with a coherent view of that problem. However, let me share my current perspective.
I grew up in a world where software was owned by me and effectively free. What I needed but couldn't afford I could crack if I cared. Most of the time I didn't care, or there were better free tools. But sometimes it mattered. I learned my graphics skills as a kid on cracked Corel Draw and Photoshop (in the end I switched to Paint.NET + GIMP + Inkscape combo, as I don't want to publish - even for free - things done on "stolen" software, but all those tools are inferior compared to paid ones). I learned my Office skills as a kid on pirated MS Office.
I started programming around 13 years ago. Programming tools were already mostly free at that time (thank you Microsoft for MSVC++2003 Toolkit, though I loved my pirated Visual C++ 6.0). But it's not about piracy, it's about access. I learned how to code because I wanted to make games, and my primary inspiration and motivation throughout the teenage years was the ability to dig in and tweak various games. I knew my way around StarCraft binaries. Hell, my first serious application of Assembly was patching SC using StarGraft. I read UnrealScript files extracted from Unreal Tournament games. I hex-edited saves, tweaked data files, poked and twisted many games. All of this was possible because I owned the data. That is, the files were there, on my hard drive, unprotected. I built my whole career and half of my life on top of that.
To quote pg[0], "It is by poking about inside current technology that hackers get ideas for the next generation. No thanks, intellectual homeowners may say, we don't need any outside help. But they're wrong. The next generation of computer technology has often—perhaps more often than not—been developed by outsiders.".
What I'm really afraid of is that the next generation, the generation of my children, will not be able to poke inside anything, because everything will be accessed remotely. In order to learn and grow I didn't need a credit card when I was 13, but I fear the next generation will not have that luxury.
You control what you open stuff in with web intents. The site the document is stored on doesn't.
Say Google Drive supports web intents:
If you have a doc on Google Drive, and you install an intent for a Google competitor word processor in your Google drive, you can open it, edit it on that service, and save it back to Google drive.
It is certainly true that most users will prioritize convenience over privacy and control.
It is still true that in the environment we are moving towards, those consumer choices are leading to a situation where _we don't control our own workstations_. Everything you do will be at the forebearance and under the observation of a corporation you pay.
You can say that that's the natural free market consequence of consumer preferences combined with current technology all you want. That is still a scary situation for us as a society, where more and more of our lives involve interacting with software, and we have less and less control over that software.
Your first paragraph is spot-on: People wanted and got control of their own computer.
However this is clearly changing now:
As data, and now functionality, keeps moving towards the cloud, quality goes up again (a polished app running on all kinds of devices), but there's little chance to tinker, to do it your own way.
You see the reason personal computing exists is because it was people who wanted this level of control and "their own computer" started using these cheezy "calculator chips" to build their own computers. What they could do was a lot less than what the mainframes/minicomputers/workstations could do but you could own your own.
All of those things are still true.
But there is a rub. Today you can go on some warez forum and get a cracked Adobe CSx suite and run it on your machine at home. That feature goes away, Your only option is to run Gimp, and if it doesn't have features you need, then you get to write new features yourself because, well its open and you have the source code.
So the world will change, it always does, but the ability for engineers and hobbyists to have their own computers that do exactly what they want them to do, that won't change.