Just wanted to thank you for the links. I was especially pleased to find that Python is supported!

Thank you! You've given me reason to sit up and pay attention when 3 rolls around, I appreciate that.

I would recommend against showing the more diehard Photoshop fans that link, though. It won't get you anywhere because what it really needs to be is a list like this:

- GIMP has a plugin/feature for automatically generating normal maps from elevation data.

- GIMP has a perspective correction feature that is superior to Photoshops in that it...

- GIMP's 'save all layers' button saves all of the layers in your file into seperate files.

.. or something like that. In the list you gave me, points 1 through 4, and 7, are irrelevant if somebody already has Photoshop. Given its de-facto marketshare, that is likely.

5 is horribly overrated. Lots of artists can script, but few (if any) can make actual plugins or modify the source code. (Even if they do dig in to the code how do they maintain those features when a new version of GIMP comes along?) I do want to mention, though, that there's another reply to my original post that seems to have covered the scripting point. I haven't checked it out yet but given that scripting is something I do, I'm certainly interested in trying that out.

6 needs an extra line, something like: "its better than Photoshop's Batch feature because...."

10... actually this is a really good one. In fact, just before this thread started, I went and found the portable version and downloaded in. Why? Welp, if the scripting that Culture20 posted a link to turns out to be worthwhile for me, coupling that with a portable version of GIMP is *awesome*. What that means is I will be able to automate certain tasks AND keep a fresh install on my DropBox account so I can even use it off-site. This is 1 out of 9.5 (I gave partial credit to the source-code bit) and, as you can already see from other replies you've gotten, most are refutable.

I'm a little worried you might read my post and think that I'm trying to perpetuate the GIMP vs. Photoshop debate. I'm not, instead I'm trying to explain what needs to happen explanation-wise to get more Photoshop people to try GIMP out. I think there's this mentality that people should switch to GIMP and that's simply not true. If you got the professional Photoshop users to start using GIMP for certain tasks, you may find that some studios may find it worth their time to invest some development time into improving it. Given how Adobe has been dicking around with the licensing, this would be a good time to get that ball rolling. Start touting the unique features it has that shave man-hours off a project. If those features don't exist, then the team needs to start talking to people like me and finding out what else they need.

Care to run off a list of ways that "GIMP doesn't come close"? If it's really so bad, it shouldn't be that difficult to name at least a dozen or so... In actuality, I expect that enumerating the shortcomings of GIMP will not be in quantity, but in terms of a relatively small number of particularly desirable features that many may perceive as critically important in such software.

Hi, professional artist here. Your latter point, at least from my perspective, is correct. I know Photoshop really well, but since I make my living doing this work I am not biased in a way that'd prevent me from using a free tool. Let me be extra clear: It would hurt me to be fanboyishly loyal to be any particular app. I do pick up and mess with GIMP from time to time, but it has two critical omissions from Photoshop that make it unusable in my field. First, it lacks adjustment layers. Second, it lacks Smart Objects.

These are both features intended to do non-destructive editing of imagery. Let's say you have a tree with green leaves. You can create a Hue/Saturation 'adjustment layer' that will turn all the green pixels beneath it blue. If you put a picture of a different tree below that layer, its leaves would turn blue, too. If you took that tree and made it a 'smart object', you'd effectively be snapshotting that image and every operation you do causes it to regenerate itself. In other words, if you shrank a Smart Object down, then scaled it back up again, you'd get all its original detail back.

If you're creating imagery it doesn't take long for these two features to change your workflow in such a way that you gain a HUGE time savings. In fact I have created several templates to speed up the generation of images I do that I just plain cannot do in GIMP. Realistically speaking that is enough man-hours lost that I'd actually make a greater profit paying for Photoshop than I would saving the cost of the license in favor of GIMP.

With that said, I'd be *very* happy if you told me that version 3 would add these features. I'd also be very happy if somebody could tell me what GIMP does that Photoshop doesn't. It's free. if it shaves man-hours off my work, then load me up with the tips. I ain't gonna switch, but I ain't above using both.

So the people working in these factories are worse off than they were before they moved to the city to get jobs at the factories. On top of that, their jobs at the factory will be taken by my robots, so they'll be even worse off than before, right? I expect we'll see waves of people moving from the cities back to the countryside, so they can take up backbreaking farm labor, right?

The next thing you know, they'll be using robots in automobile and aircraft factories!

Getting a movie made, particularly one with this kind of history behind it, isn't a linear path from initial concept to finished product. This thing is in its very early stages. Arndt is a damned fine writer, certainly better than any of the sharpshooters here on Slashdot. Disney turns out good movies and bad. It's too early to have any idea what the final outcome will be, but I am happy they picked Arndt to write the screenplay.

In other words, naiive hipsters who don't really know much about business yet think business cards are dead. Judging what's going on in the real world by what you encounter at SXSW is a losing game.

As several of you have noticed, I was thinking of the wrong Nimmer. Sorry, folks! Please mod my original post down -1 Stupid.

Nimmer is the real deal. He wrote the definitive treatise on copyright law. It is cited in more judicial opinions than any other scholarly work on the subject. That doesn't mean Google is necessarily screwed, but it certainly means this is a serious matter.

Despite the persistent belief that copyleft and the GPL are antithetical to copyright law, nothing could be further from the truth. The GPL relies on copyright law; without copyright there could be no GPL. Google's attitude seems to be that copyright is merely a hassle, an obstacle to be routed around. Even if they are not found to be legally in violation of the GPL, they obviously Bionic with the deliberate intent of routing around it.

If openness is a virtue, what is sort-of-openness?

OMG! It's like these people in government are human beings with nuanced opinions and conflicting constituencies!

I thought the discussion was about mainstream adoption of open source software.

... writing silly GUIs for things that don't need it and others like you that insist on having everything done for you tells me you'd rather be having a different discussion altogether. OSS will continue to be marvelous for geeks and ignored by end users if you believe you're building the software solely for yourself. It's perfectly valid to build software for yourself and for those like you, but you can't expect that people unlike you will start using OSS.

Yeah, the title reads like "Adolf Hitler On Tolerance and Equal Opportunities".

Yes, because Microsoft is killing millions and MdI is collaborating with them on a nuclear weapon. This is not a discussion about different approaches to creating and distributing software.

Anything that helps make detecting cancer cheaper, easier, and faster is good in my book.

From the press release for the study:

OpenLogic found that among the applications that use the Apache or GPL/LGPL licenses, the compliance rate was only 29%. Android compliance was 27% and iPhone/iOS compliance was 32%. Overall compliance of Android applications using the GPL/LGPL was 0%.

Experts come up with stupid ideas all the time.

Agreed. But what I find most interesting about this discussion is that the article is thin on facts, so most of us are basing our alternative plans on only the sparsest information. Also, the strong thread of mistrusting government is bleeding over into what is essentially a technical discussion. The merits of compensating the owners or not has nothing to do with the technical solution of how to most safely and efficiently dispose of the explosives. You can say what you want about Homeland Security dipshits, but law enforcement demolitions experts have been doing this sort of work for a long time, and they have demonstrated technical competence. Mistrusting them because they work for government is just as stupid as trusting them merely because they work for the government.