Amazing!

Wow. I am totally FLOORED by the amount of response I've gotten over my article. And I'd like to thank all of you for commenting and keeping the discussion going. A lot of you have made a TON of great points.

Thanks for flaming me on my spelling and grammar issues (sarcasm). If you don't like this blog, I'm not holding a gun to your head to read it. Feel free to go elsewhere. To be honest I didn't really think anyone would actually READ it. I'll try harder in the future to hold my spelling and grammar to a higher standard. As for the issue of my not trying the latest greatest version of the GIMP, that all lies with the fact that I use Ubuntu Dapper. I use the version of GIMP that comes preinstalled, and currently there is no upgradeable version available to me without whipping out the command line and going through a bunch of steps that I simply do not want to do. This is a problem I will address one of these days, but please do not flame me for it. When Ubuntu Edgy is released I will be sure to try the new version of GIMP that will come with that as well.

I am very dissapointed to read that a lot of you don't think GIMP is able to reach the status of a professional level tool. I work as a photo retoucher and graphic designer at my day job, and besides the points I leveled in my article, I am fully able to use GIMP for approximately 80% of what I have to do. I'd say thats a VERY good start. With a bit of funding, and a concerted effort to clean up and organize the UI, GIMP isnt that far off the mark.

People laughed at the fact that I even posed the topic of comparing Photoshop to GIMP, but the point of this blog is to highlight projects in the open source community that have the potential of breaking out and becoming widely used. We know this scenario is certainly possible, Firefox and Open Office have proven that. Hell, entire small COUNTRIES are dedicating themselves to open software to reduce costs. This is just a notice to the developers that if they put in a bit more effort into professionalizing the project, it could produce a product that would shine as yet another jewel in the open source crown.

On the topic of GimpShop, I have used it, and it doesn't really add any REAL functionality to the software, it just reorganizes the menu so that it more closely resembles Photoshop. I was simply talking about the main GIMP function set.

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Anyway, thank you again for the support, comments, and arguments. All are welcome here. Look for my new article regarding the war between KDE and GNOME, coming either later today or tomorrow. Thanks for visiting The Linux Advocate, come again soon!