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They did not "lose" any money; they never had it
What they lost is potential customers
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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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.
If only I was free enough to code the end of software companies.
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.
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.
apocalyptic hellscape
Which is, sadly, where we are right now
Heading there but plenty of room to get worse
I think it's because I suck at Photoshop to begin with and using both tools incorrectly.
I'll be honest I've tried gimp and found that I'm terrible and not interested in making or editing any form of digital media. I've also tried Photoshop. Paint is more my speed fast and ugly.
all adobe needed to do was make one time purchase software and not subscription. The CC model is insane
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.
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.
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
Legend.
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.
Someone asked me yesterday what products besides Adobe's there were for his elderly cousin to merge PDFs, or extract pages. I proposed a few options, so I'm technically helping to lose money for Adobe. I'm doing my part 😁
Linux comes (at least on Mint and Ubuntu) with the poppler-utils suite of tools. you can merge, extract pages, even rip all the images out of a pdf in source quality. very useful.
Yeah you get a lot of options on Linux. I used pdftk last time.
Unfortunately the parameters here were, "elderly dude" "needs GUI" and "on Windows" :-(
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.
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What a bastard. Consider the plight of the multinational corporation. They are ashen faced in the C-suite mumbling lamentations, 'number go down' and 'shareholder value'.
Good lad.
I know quite a few professionals that use GIMP and Inkscape just so they arent locked into the adobe ecosystem and monthly/yearly fees.
Man ain't nobody lost money because of Gimp. Flawed argument aside, at least Blender could be in for a shout
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I should mail this guy $5. Or, like, an edited image of a $5 bill with his face on it.
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Lets make it billions!
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