Slashdot Mirror

So he tries to persuade people to agree with him, perhaps passionately, perhaps vehemently, maybe even not so nicely ... but (to my knowledge) he has never used force or fraud to coerce people into behaving the way he thinks they should.

It is pretty obvious that you have not worked for him.

You also seem to ignore how treacherous the GPLv3 is.

Think about this: When RMS wrote the GPLv2, linux didn't exist. RMS thought GNU would always be the main free OS out there, and that he would always be its master. Therefore, he designed the GPLv2 to keep GNU free.

Since linux has become more popular than GNU, RMS is trying to destroy linux. The (L)GPLv3 is designed to be specially incompatible with the GPLv2. The word "reuse" appeared in GPL 1 and 2, but has disappeared from GPLv3. RMS is forbiding people from use GPLv3 libraries in GPLv2 programs.

If you released a program under GPLv2+, it would remain GPLv2+; the GPLv2 forces to "keep intact" license notices (section 1). But GPLv3 allows license notices to be modified (section 5b). Therefore, if you release a program under GPLv3+, RMS can publish a non-free GPLv4, and then change all your license notices to GPLv4+, effectively forking a privative derivative of your work.

The GPLv3 is a trap. Don't use it. You have been warned.

There are possibilities for Inkscape (at least, if you've installed Scribus), with the open source ICC profiles. Check here for one way to do it. Basically, in Scribus just link the ICC profile, export that SVG file, then import it into Scribus and print in CMYK. FYI, Scribus is also FOSS.

Inkscaper Alexandre Prokoudine provides a nicely visual article about the release, including a video to demonstrate some of the new things you can do with it: http://libregraphicsworld.org/...

It gets worse. GIMP also has an atrocious, screen hogging interface that was clearly designed by someone who doesn't really understand the workflow of most professional users.

I agree it has a strange interface, which seems to be different to almost any other app, but I would not say screen-hogging. In fact one of the advantages of the wirerd design is that you can have a full-screen image and float the various toolboxes in front as you need them.

It's also slow. Very slow. For example, a 64 pixel Gaussian blur takes twice as long in GIMP to compute as it does Photoshop, the same for most other operations.

I don't know how it compares with other apps but a 64 pixel Gaussian blur on a large image takes just under 3 seconds.

The text tool is awful too.

It's a fair cop - yes it is pretty awful - difficult to position text, size at anything apart from a point size, etc.

GIMP is way over-promoted by FOSS zealots who usually can't accomplish much more than cropping a picture and applying a few filters to the entire image.

There are some real artists using it.

You only used one out of three, you guys are putting less effort into this as the years go by. Guess Gimp has been winning for a while now :)

Now who's not putting in enough effort? ;-)

Still no support for 16-bit per channel after all these years.

Isn't that implemented by the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL), partially implemented in GIMP 2.6 with a migration path that should end with GIMP 2.10 (the next version) fully utilizing it? 2.10 has been specifically noted as supporting 16 (and 32!) bits per color channel. That link, from a year ago, even has a screen shot. Still, 2.10 doesn't have a release schedule, and despite that the developers are committed to "shorter development cycles," it looks more like it's still a ways out (2.9, the dev pre-release, is still several months out at the earliest). Still, it's heartening to know they're on the right path (and that they've gotten around the design flaws that preiviously made this kind of feature impossible to implement).

The worst thing about GIMP is that its existence leads the FOSS community into complacency. People need to realize that there really is no good open-source competitor to Photoshop and start working on one, rather than pretending that GIMP fits the bill and then arguing with creative professionals who repeatedly point out why it doesn't.

Again, GEGL comes to the rescue. The whole point of it is to make it a library so it can be used from GIMP or any other utility. It represents that ground-up rewrite you so desperately plea for.

Regarding a professional-grade tool ... Free Software never really offers that. You can get close, and sometimes you get lucky, but for the most part, there is no free ride. Generally, the best you can hope for is a commercial closed-source application that works well in an otherwise Free Software environment. It's icing on the cake when the vendor of such software offers a Free version of it (e.g. Codeweavers and Crossover vs WINE).

There's always "more" work needed, and for high-end items like the Photoshop features missing from GIMP, there's rarely enough community-driven (read: volunteer) time and energy to make it happen. It's worth noting when a major feature is missing, as car mechanics tend not to be racecar drivers (as mentioned elsewhere in the comments), but it's not worth complaining unless you're rolling up your sleeves and/or putting up a bounty to make developers' time easier to allocate.

Here is a good article by Alexander Prodoukine in which it's explained how MuseScore improved while typesetting the Goldberg Variations: http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/open-goldberg-variations-mission-accomplished