Among the most significant changes with this year’s Elements releases has little to do with new features but instead concerns the ways users purchase and own the software. While prior versions of Photoshop and Premiere Elements have been lifetime licenses — the user buys the software and then owns it indefinitely — this year’s release has moved to a three-year license term.
There has to be a meaningful number of companies where each individually is spending more on adobe licenses than it would cost them to pay a bunch of developers to get gimp to the point where it is a fully sufficient alternative. But hey, the only thing more important to capitalists than making profit seems to be, to not go for cheaper FLOSS options, rather than spending pointlessly large amounts of money on proprietary software…
There is still the perception that it’s too cheap to be good in many cases. I’ve run into this fairly recently. It’s stupid, but it exists, and sometimes it exists in the people making the decisions.
Feels like there’s a very simple solution to that. “We can’t use free software, you get what you pay for. We’re not switching to GIMP.” “Okay, what about Rasteditor? It costs $99/year.” “Sounds good, get a license for everyone on the team.” And Rasteditor is just a fork of GIMP with a different logo and the subscription model just donates to the GIMP project.
A lot of FOSS projects have succeeded in approximately this way. I think it can only be a matter of time until this happens even in this area.