> I used Photoshop for 8 years, including for web development, before switching to Gimp. Open source could always get better at products, but its historical development models were geared towards exactly the above (IE it does what it says on the tin) This, however, is not as big an issue as the first (as people can always still pick it all up when that happens) Secondarily, you have the issue of survival in marketplace (IE There are a rash of OSS companies achieving near 100% of total addressable market share, and still going bankrupt due to inability to monetize). This is totally cool, but also totally orthogonal to building "a good product that people want to use". Open source focuses mainly on the engineering part, often creating technical meritocracies that focus on making "The technically best software". Not that the engineering doesn't matter - of course it does, but if you want a good and successful product, engineering is just a part of what is needed. That is - the good open source products are often built/driven either by extremely product focused people (This is rare), or by companies driving them with PMs. Not all, but the ones that aren't have clear product management of some sort. If you go look at areas where an open source thing is a de-facto market-leader, they are mostly infrastructure.
(and pretty good at infrastructure products). IMHO, what the author gets wrong what so many people who claim this (they are not the first, or the last) get wrong - open source as a whole sucks at building products, but is great at building infrastructure. The chart is interesting because it misses the important part - it covers time, but not adoption.įor example, adoption of GIMP has not likely materially increased over time (as a relative percent of total addressable market)
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