darktable springing from the Linux world is self selecting for technical people.
I think the author also underestimates just how entrenched Adobe is in this market. Other corporate competitors with paid developers, probably some software design process he agrees with more and advertising budget barely make a dent in Adobe’s market share. You can have the best, most well designed software package in the world for a task but it’s still going to take a lot of energy to overcome that inertia. $12 a month is literally nothing if you’re a business. I paid more than that in local license fees, heck a phone line is more than that a month. No one who’s used to CC and hustling to pay rent is going to switch and sink the time investment to learn something else easily.
Combined with the inbuilt support and terabytes of knowledge built around those products and it’s basically a non-starter to even consider anything else for most professionals. Adobe has enough money and market share to starve competition to death.
I think it’s far less “darktable is made by and for gross nerds” and more the cost/benefit analysis for professional artists is pretty one sided. darktable wouldn’t just have to be trading blows with LR/ACR to gain traction but be head and shoulders above and blowing it out of the water on all fronts to cause a measurable move. As it stands now the risk of spending too long on an edit, not being able to get decent results due to not knowing how something works, missing out on keeping up on Adobe training/learning and so on are all negatives not in darktable’s favor.
That being said being commercial doesn’t necessarily make an artist somehow more legitimate and I think there are plenty of people (maybe even trained artists) who have a more boring day job and want a better/more flexible tool. It’s OK to just have that market IMO.
@betazoid I agree in that it reads a bit like a self-own.
@hanatos the growth question is something I’ve struggled with myself as well. I think it’s natural to want to tell everyone about something we’re excited about and share the joy as it were irrespective of the economic underpinnings. Although I think it is easy to get caught up in the competitive/capitalist mindset. Maybe it’s an odd form of tribalism, who knows. I don’t think darktable has to grow but I like sharing work I’ve created with it and showing how I get results out of it. I think it’d be nice if people didn’t felt so pinned in by the corporate techno-feudalist future we seem to be headed for and had other options. I guess in that way I hope they take a look at darktable, vkdt or RawTherapee and so on.