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Linux may be free, but there's no truly viable MS Office alternative, nothing that matches Exchange, there's no professional level Photoshop, there's nothing to edit videos with, nor post processing, good luck doing complex audio work

Ardour, anyone? It has been around for quite a few years, and is a really great professional grade DAW/production system. Try googling before posting something quite that ridiculous.

If you are a creative professional -- Linux is completely worthless. Sorry, but it is. I wish that were not the case, but there's no professional-level creative apps for Linux.

I guess all those Xara users, Ardour users, Cinelerra users, MainActor users, Blender users, VariCad users, Jahshaka/CineFX users, etc, are completely boned.

Of all the programs available for Linux, few are of comparable quality to those available to Windows or OSX.

That's just stupid. There are programs of poor quality on all of the major operating systems. Linux has its share of badly put-together programs, but saying that "few" are of comparable quality simply illustrates that you don't spend very much time with Linux systems or just have very poor choice in software.

hi,

i feel your pain! funding killed my project... and herein lies my story :) jahshaka (http://jahshaka.org/) was a open source digital content creation tool for film/video released at the start of the online video revolution. We had great hopes and we were pretty hot with 40-50k downloads a month and a active community. we won a few awards (best graphics software of the year) and intel contacted us saying they wanted to help out.

One thing led to another and with intels help we got £4 million from a tier-1 vc in the UK, under the terms that i move to the UK to be cheif evangleist (?). Sounds great right? Well for the first year 75% the funding went into the hands of upper management and their consultants (since upper management were clueless to open source).

Then they close-sourced the project, so with the communities help we tried to wage a war against management to 'open their eyes' and i ended up getting sacked for it - and left stuck in london with my family, wife and kids. And london aint cheap.

After the 2nd year (with no progress at-all, no new releases, and a failed attempt at build a CMS which was nothing to do with our project) eventually i was hired back as a consultant.

I immediatly directed as much of the budget as possible (turned out to be around 2 mil us) into building a fork of the underlying engine in the original project, called the openlibraries, under the LGPL. i took a back seat and directed this while i watched another CEO proceed to build a online video distribution system with the rest of our cash (also nothing to do with our project but whatever) with a goal of eventually getting my stuff back.

In the end i was able to use my consulting fees to buy it all back... for around £50k... only to find out that i had wasted 4 years of my life and was back to where i was when i got the funding. I got some cool tech out of the deal and some cool domains (http://plugin.com/) but it has then taken me the better half of this year to figure out how to get the project back off the ground.

so, if nothing at all, you can learn from mmy experiences. open source is not about money its about the people. if you want to build a comercial business then you need to make up your mind from the start.

hope this helps,

Jah Shaka http://www.jahshaka.org/

hi,

i feel your pain! funding killed my project... and herein lies my story :) jahshaka (http://jahshaka.org/) was a open source digital content creation tool for film/video released at the start of the online video revolution. We had great hopes and we were pretty hot with 40-50k downloads a month and a active community. we won a few awards (best graphics software of the year) and intel contacted us saying they wanted to help out.

One thing led to another and with intels help we got £4 million from a tier-1 vc in the UK, under the terms that i move to the UK to be cheif evangleist (?). Sounds great right? Well for the first year 75% the funding went into the hands of upper management and their consultants (since upper management were clueless to open source).

Then they close-sourced the project, so with the communities help we tried to wage a war against management to 'open their eyes' and i ended up getting sacked for it - and left stuck in london with my family, wife and kids. And london aint cheap.

After the 2nd year (with no progress at-all, no new releases, and a failed attempt at build a CMS which was nothing to do with our project) eventually i was hired back as a consultant.

I immediatly directed as much of the budget as possible (turned out to be around 2 mil us) into building a fork of the underlying engine in the original project, called the openlibraries, under the LGPL. i took a back seat and directed this while i watched another CEO proceed to build a online video distribution system with the rest of our cash (also nothing to do with our project but whatever) with a goal of eventually getting my stuff back.

In the end i was able to use my consulting fees to buy it all back... for around £50k... only to find out that i had wasted 4 years of my life and was back to where i was when i got the funding. I got some cool tech out of the deal and some cool domains (http://plugin.com/) but it has then taken me the better half of this year to figure out how to get the project back off the ground.

so, if nothing at all, you can learn from mmy experiences. open source is not about money its about the people. if you want to build a comercial business then you need to make up your mind from the start.

hope this helps,

Jah Shaka http://www.jahshaka.org/

there are no working Theora VFW plugins

NO video editing software supports it

and finally

no streaming server for Theora

If you need an editor then take a look at: http://www.jahshaka.org/ I haven't got many expirences with, but it supose to be a little different from all other major video editors... If you need to do any encoding, you might find and editor that can do it, but you will properbly be very good of with ffmpeg...

I recently ran across jashaka which is also cross-platform.

if you are okay with non-free then Mainconcept make a pretty decent video editor. On the Free/free front Jahshaka hit rc3(?) recently. On KDE you have KDEnlive....

There is a very cool open-source linux app called 'jahshaka' that provides a complete compositing / editing / rendering solution for Linux

http://www.jahshaka.org/

The default Cinelerra is quirky enough that gentoo doesn't want to install it by default - is this fixed in 2.0?

Cinelerra-cvs http://cvs.cinelerra.org/ is a fork which incorporates a variety of patches (apparently the original Cinelerra is developed by a single author, so cinelerra-cvs tries to avoid the bottlenecks that often result). cinelerra-cvs can be installed on gentoo, and once one switches to the Bluedot theme it's not half bad to look at :-).

Also of interest are LiVES http://www.xs4all.nl/~salsaman/lives/ and Jahshaka http://www.jahshaka.org/ - there's also Kdenlive but that seems to not be actively developed any more: http://kdenlive.sourceforge.net/index.html

The company I work for always provides me with Non-OSS supplies like Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Frontpage, MS Office, and Windows XP. But my work at home involves various types of media projects including audio, video, and web. Right now I use Nvu for development, Audacity for my audio editing, and I'm trying out Jahshaka for video editing. And of course Open Office for everything else.

Weta studios had an absurd number of IBM IntelliStations (Maya, Renderman, Alfred).

Seems a venerable KDE was their desktop of choice. More here.

jahshaka.org

This looked like it could be quite good a little while ago, and they seem to be coming along nicely. May be worth a look

- Gef