pics

I would argue Adobe lost more money from pirated Adobe apps than GIMP

They did not "lose" any money; they never had it

What they lost is potential customers

Isn't this called, "competition"?

Gimp, Paint.Net, VLC...

A little bit of hope for a future more like Star Trek and less like Wall-E.

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.

Adobe didn't lose money. You can't lose money you never had.

Because of Adobe's hatred and abuse of their users, Adobe lost millions of dollars.

Adobe hasn't lost anything, they have tied up "design" for any business use. Its a total monopoly.

Look... I like gimp a lot and Jehan is a G.

Adobe has lost basically nothing. Because Gimp is still ridiculously underpowered compared to Adobe Photoshop (let alone the rest of the suite). That is perfectly fine since the vast majority of users don't need those capabilities. But the people who do (e.g. professionals)? There is really no other choice.

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. ;)

Man ain't nobody lost money because of Gimp. Flawed argument aside, at least Blender could be in for a shout

This is like movie companies saying that me pirating a movie cost them money.

Absence of a free thing isn't going to magic some money into my wallet with which to buy your thing, I'm still broke AF.

There's also Krita if you're more of an artist

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.

Legend.

I'm so thankful to people like Pages who work hard on free alternatives.

I should mail this guy $5. Or, like, an edited image of a $5 bill with his face on it.

I know quite a few professionals that use GIMP and Inkscape just so they arent locked into the adobe ecosystem and monthly/yearly fees.

all adobe needed to do was make one time purchase software and not subscription. The CC model is insane

I used Photoshop professionally for nearly 30 years. I retired and don't need it anymore, so now I use GIMP on Linux for the few personal projects I want to make.

GIMP's interface leaves a lot to be desired. One example, in Photoshop the Channels tab shows all the channels and includes any masks you make, they look and work similarly to the layers, and it's intuitive--when you learn one, you know the other. GIMP doesn't work that way, in fact I've yet to make sense of the channels.

Also, typically one would expect filters to only be applied to a selected layer and even to a selection within that layer. Some GIMP filters apply to the whole image, flattening my layers, and creating new ones. Fortunately, these are made in a new document, so you don't lose anything, but the filter cannot be applied to a partial image, you'd need to pull the result back into your original image and mask out the part you wanted. Very strange.

I could go on about how selecting works and doesn't work, but I won't.

No, Adobe has not "lost millions" due to GIMP, they haven't lost a cent. People who use GIMP were either never going to pay Adobe a cent, or already have and are using GIMP now, for similar reasons to my own. Virtually no one uses GIMP professionally at any volume of interest to Adobe.

It's a good and useful tool, but it's severely lacking compared to Photoshop.

Switched to GIMP from Photoshop probably 15 years ago. Adobe didn't lose any money, however, I've always pirated from those greedy fucks.