Maybe because free software doesn’t advertise? I am not even sure if “market share” is the right word as most free software isn’t participating in any market, it just exists.
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Therefore I wrote “observed” market share. What I mean was what was explained above, the internet and all those magazines are full of photoshop and lightroom tutorials and presets, which is free advertisement for adobe. You can see them everywhere. For free software, you have to know where to look to find tutorials. For me this is not a big deal, I know where I have to look/ask. But I would really like to understand why the drawbacks of the commercial software that have already been mentioned (e.g. licensing model vs access to your files, impossible to understand internals, …) are neglected by so many people. This is the reason that I would love to see such a plenary discussion.
In my job I work a lot with very intelligent, smart people with a deep technical background. Even for them it seems not to be a big deal that their work may be lost due to the reasons stated above, and they understand the shiny but intransparent user interfaces and the disability to see the code to know what’s going on as a feature and a user friendly behaviour. For me it is hard to understand them, but I want to better understand them, again, a reason to see such a face-to-face discussion.
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@Carmelo_DrRaw That’s a great point to bring up as well I think, and the crux of a much larger discussion. Could a painter ever imagine that someone else owned the canvas they painted on or the brushes they painted with (as @paperdigits already said).
Because we, as a free software community, lack the manpower and public-relations personnel to help raise the awareness of free software in general.
In some cases we are a victim of our own perceptions and voices, where we feel that being reasonable and factual should be enough to propagate the benefits that we all obviously see:
See? We sometimes feel that any reasonable person would easily see these as fundamentally important points and embrace them as such. It just turns out that this is normally quite wrong - even for intelligent folks!
What doesn’t help further is the quality, quantity, and discoverability of resources for serious photographic work using free software is lacking.
It’s my opinion that we should be advertising - or at the very least being honest, vocal, and visible to as many as possible…
As a side note, the very existence of this entire site and community is specifically to address these types of issues along with providing a nice place for all of us photo/free-software nerds to commiserate.
We should be directing folks here as often as possible to help propagate the much more serious and incredible work possible with free software1.
1 And I should be getting off my ass to keep content flowing and things fresh - I’ve just been busy irl lately and nobody else has been available yet. 
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I try to point Reddit folks here but I’m not sure that it’s so simple to get people to cross forum boundaries.
I need to keep working on Filmulator too, I’ve been only nibbling away at some changes lately.
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It’s IMHO even worse: the painting would simply become “not visible anymore” as soon as the renting of the brushes is stopped ;-)!
Well, most commercial programs are not bound to license renewal, so in general it is not a problem that work couldn’t be accessed in the future. That doesn’t apply to Adobe’s latest offerings of course, but I guess many people already invested so much into those programs (even if they only had to learn a new tool it might be a deal breaker for many) that there is no way back for them. And then there are the big masses of people who 1) have no clue and 2) want to be as cool as the big boys, so they use the same tools. And to be honest, just because open source would allow them to look into the code and understand what’s happening doesn’t mean that they are capable of doing that. And if we are honest, even those who know how to read code don’t look into it in general. The way we use all those free tools isn’t any different from how others are using commercial programs. Just free (as beer).
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Pat, sure, I see your points and I’m aware of them. I am using free software wherever possible, since more than 15 years. That means 99 in my private life (tax software and turboprint being the only exceptions) and about 70 in my professional life. But I again totally failed to transfer my point (maybe because I am not a native English speaker and don’t know the right words or, more probable, because of my complicated writing style that I indeed have to get rid of). I wanted to bring up the idea, in the context of the jpeg2raw podcast that brought the idea into my mind, that a plenary discussion (is this the right word¹) about this topic would be interesting to see. Bringing people of both worlds together face-to-face and discuss these things. That could maybe lead to new insights that you do not get when you stay in your community. LGM could be one opportunity for something like this to happen.
¹I thought on something like what the German public TV is broadcasting Sundays around 10 pm, where about 6 politicians are sitting in a half circle and discussing a given topic.
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Yes and no. I am not able to understand most of the code of e.g. Darktable, but, as you know (and thanks to you), one or the other of my ideas made its way into Darktable. That would not have happened with lightroom or other proprietary software. Of course I cannot be involved with every software that I use to the same degree, and there is software where I am much more involved for one or the other reason, but it is the contributing¹ users and the different degrees of contribution that are possible that is a difference between them and us[TM]. Of course, they listen to the users as well, but they listen to the masses and with free software one voice can be heard. And the level of contribution can change. Some start with bug reports, and become more involved over time. And usually, before I report a bug, I have a look at the code. Sometimes this helps finding the bug or at least helps me doing better bug reports. That’s not possible with closed-source software.
¹I mean real changes to the software, tutorials are written for both. But with free software a single user has the chance (not the right) to see his ideas coming to life.
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Maybe you could point out how open minded the foss comunity is.
An hour ago I read this article which is very interesting and very true.
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As far as I have heard, CC still lets you view files, just not enter the “develop” mode to edit them, if you allow your Adobe subscription to lapse. So they’re not holding anything hostage.
Not that I like the business model. At least it lets you avoid the sense of “sunk costs” when you eventually want to switch away…
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Then my informations are outdated or incorrect… it means that if you stop paying, your work is not useless but just frozen.
Still worth making a point out of that!
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I was lucky enough that when I was taking photography in school, my teachers were big fans of learning how to look at things and see what you wanted at the scene. I try to keep the images I see while shooting fresh in my head so that I can come home and try and get as close on screen as what I saw when I took the photo. I think that has been the single biggest thing that has helped me as a photographer.
I’m thinking perhaps of making a stronger point for learning/thinking about processing in terms of results and processes as opposed to particular software steps.
In that same lane of thought, from an article linked below, I thought this was good:
No one ever looks at a house and says “I wonder what brand of hammer they used to build that house? That’s how I’ll know if it’s a good house or not.”
@patdavid Incidentally I’ve been offered the chance to speak for 15 - 20 minutes about free software at the photo club at work. I’m going to put tog ether some slides (so much good stuff in this thread already), and I can put the slides on github or something. Maybe we can start sharing this kind of information so others can reuse it and adapt it.
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Yes, and yes. We absolutely should be sharing whatever resources we can for this. I have no problem doing this on github if you think it might be the best way:
Just hit me up and I’ll add anyone that wants in. I can start by adding in the slides I sent to pippin to use at LGM2015 “State of the Libre Graphics” presentation.
If you’d like a hand with your slide deck please don’t hesitate to hit me up (for assets/images or more).
So does that mean that Adobe CS is free for anyone to use if all they want to do is view existing Adobe-format files? Interesting if true.
Another way that a subscription model can get you into trouble: I went to a talk on processing of nighttime photos. When the speaker tried to fire up PS to demonstrate, he hit a license check dialog. He said he had checked and verified his license on that laptop earlier that day in preparation for the talk, but apparently that wasn’t enough: Adobe decided it wanted a verification right then. He had to leave the audience waiting while he wandered off to find someone who could help him get on the network; that done, we all got to watch as he connected to the network and then to Adobe and finally got PS running. Most embarrassing.
Live demos are risky enough without wondering if the software is suddenly going to decide it’s time for a license check. At many talk locations, a network connection isn’t an option. I’d also hate to be processing vacation photos in a hotel and have my software suddenly stop working because the hotel wi-fi is broken. I’m somewhat amazed so many people are willing to put up with that.
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It may only be true of photos already in your own Lightroom CC catalog, not PSDs and such.
Some images from @andabata for consideration. I’ll winnow these down to a few images to submit to the producer to cycle during the show.
Thank you @andabata!
I gave my talk and demo yesterday, it went pretty well! I gave a brief overview of Free Software and talked about what Free software means to me as an artist. Then I spoke the available tools, where to get help, and how to contribute. Then I demoed some of the tools available in Rawtherapee (Lab adjustments, film emulation) and gimp (wavelet decompose & a bit from your skin retouching tutorial, some gmic filters, and a little resynthisizer).
I ended up talking for the whole hour! And I was asked to do another session where I actually go through the whole skin retouching tutorial. So awesome!
People were curious about free software and I explained how projects work, how most free software projects are not corporate backed, how they get stuff (web hosting, downloads).
It was solid advice to demo cross-platform software, so RT and gimp were good calls! I also found another Linux user, which is great as well, don’t encounter too many others that use it in the wild.
Anyway, hopefully I’ll be sending a pull request soon!
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Fantastic! 
Glad to hear it went well! It’s easy to lose track of time and just keep going when you’re talking about a subject you enjoy personally.
This always helps a ton, I think. Especially with such a dominant number of OS X/Win users out there comparatively. Remember – this is just a gateway drug to more software freedom! 
Gladly awaiting the PR!
So you’re saying there is a chance that someone other than the developers will use the software? 
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