Software at snails pace
Why is it that some hugely popular open source software projects seem to develop at a snails pace.
When it comes to the software world, there is commercial software and there is open-source software as two major factors in the industry.
Commercial software is developed and sold to (or subscribed to) by customers and the profits are used to continue developing and advancing the software (presumably).
Open source software is generally software that is made available to users for free, along with the code that makes the software. People with the right skills can audit the code, modify and submit improvements to the code and in many cases, fork the code and create a separate project based off the code.
The entire GNU/Linux operating system and supporting software is open source and has thousands of developers contributing code to it. There is an army of coders, writers, translators, UI designers, etc, etc out there contributing their time and skills to software that is free for anyone to use. It’s pretty amazing really.
However, despite this potential for an open source project to have huge teams of people working on improving it and making it better, some projects, and not exactly small ones, seem to suffer from extremely slow development pace and lack of features compared to commercial “alternatives”.
For example, the oddly named image manipulation software known as GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is often suggested as the alternative to Photoshop. For very simple use, it could be considered that, but in reality, for serious use, it lacks important features and functions that have been available for photoshop users for a long time now.
I’m not just talking about the relatively recent addition of generative AI to Photoshop, but things that have been there for a long time that just make it easier for users. Automatic subject selection and masking, automatic sky detection and masking, removing objects and intelligently filling in the space left behind. Smart objects. Adjustment layers. The list goes on. Some of these are in development, but it could be years before we see a release that has just one of them.
These ideas aren’t new and there are plenty of smart people out there that could surely implement them. So why is this software lacking them and lagging so far behind the commercial offerings?
It’s not just GIMP either. Plenty of open source software projects seem to develop at slow paces… and yes… I do understand that it’s being developed by people who have lives and other things to be doing. They have careers and families and so on. I don’t mean to disparage or downgrade their achievements so far. It’s just thoughts rattling in my head.
I’m going to make a commitment to contribute some of my time to open source projects that I use on a daily basis in the hopes that I can help to improve them. I am not much of an application coder, but I’m sure I can help in other ways as a improve my development skills in that area.
With the push from Microsoft and Apple and others to try to force AI in places that people don’t want it. I see a potential increase in users of open source software on the horizon and I wish I could say it will be smooth sailing for them and they will find all the functionality they want in the open source offerings.
However, thanks to projects like Flatpak and AppImage (yes, even Snap) there is less dependency hell and a more suitable platform for commercial develops to be able to deploy software knowing it should work fine regardless of the distro someone is using. I think this has potential to bring more commercial developers to Linux. Time will tell.
