I’m not really sure what assumptions you can reasonably make about me or my generation given that you have no idea who I am or how old I am, but I’ve been working with FOSS in my personal life for about 20 years give or take, a bit less than that in my professional life. I actually used to work in the music industry professionally before changing careers to tech with a FOSS slant during the pandemic, so I’ve seen both sides of this coin.
I’m genuinely not trying to shit on FOSS tools or say that they’re not suitable for creative professionals (my gripes with Darktable are very much personal to me), I love FOSS and the philosophy strongly aligns with my personal values but it’s not just about how “good” these tools are on an objective level. This is a cultural problem as much as it is an engineering problem, as you seem to have correctly identified.
You have to understand how ubiquitous something like Pro Tools suite is in the music industry and for how long that has been the case - the Pro Tools session format truly is a global industry standard by anyone’s measure. You can walk into just about any professional recording studio on the planet with your session files and the recording engineer will know exactly what to do with them, and so will mastering engineers and record producers. If you go to school for audio engineering, they’re teaching you Pro Tools. There are entire companies that produce outboard gear and control surfaces just for use with Pro Tools. You get the idea. The reason for that ubiquity is that Pro Tools, like many other creative software solutions, captured the market in the 90s when every other solution was an utter joke in comparison and they built on it from there. Sure, there’s fantastic alternatives now, but when you know Pro Tools like the back of your hand and so do all of your colleagues and collaborators, when all of your hardware and software works with it seamlessly… how likely are you to change?
I’m not suggesting that this isn’t a problem by the way - vendor lock-in is a serious bugbear of mine - but it’s a very real barrier to getting creative professionals to switch to FOSS alternatives, and in turn to getting software vendors to take FOSS platforms seriously. It’s a reality that cannot be hand-waved away by saying that x or y tool works great and that people just need to learn it and switch so that they can use Linux. If you can’t run Pro Tools on Linux, that’s a whole industry that won’t use it. It’s that simple.
Nah, the only reason those tools are used are because of momentum and the fact that most of their new hires have experience with it, also due to momentum.
Ban Photoshop from being taught in schools, and in two generations everyone will say that Photoshop is crap because it takes so long to do anything.
You made me chuckle! I was raised on open source by a software engineer. I was using gimp on Ubuntu when I was 7 or 8 years old. I understand your sentiment completely, but you need to understand that time is money, and if something like layer blending takes even a few more clicks in gimp than photoshop, it is not ready to compete. Of course, you can think whatever you want about software you don’t rely on for a living. The rest of the world will smile and move on with reality.
I’m not really sure what assumptions you can reasonably make about me or my generation given that you have no idea who I am or how old I am, but I’ve been working with FOSS in my personal life for about 20 years give or take, a bit less than that in my professional life. I actually used to work in the music industry professionally before changing careers to tech with a FOSS slant during the pandemic, so I’ve seen both sides of this coin.
I’m genuinely not trying to shit on FOSS tools or say that they’re not suitable for creative professionals (my gripes with Darktable are very much personal to me), I love FOSS and the philosophy strongly aligns with my personal values but it’s not just about how “good” these tools are on an objective level. This is a cultural problem as much as it is an engineering problem, as you seem to have correctly identified.
You have to understand how ubiquitous something like Pro Tools suite is in the music industry and for how long that has been the case - the Pro Tools session format truly is a global industry standard by anyone’s measure. You can walk into just about any professional recording studio on the planet with your session files and the recording engineer will know exactly what to do with them, and so will mastering engineers and record producers. If you go to school for audio engineering, they’re teaching you Pro Tools. There are entire companies that produce outboard gear and control surfaces just for use with Pro Tools. You get the idea. The reason for that ubiquity is that Pro Tools, like many other creative software solutions, captured the market in the 90s when every other solution was an utter joke in comparison and they built on it from there. Sure, there’s fantastic alternatives now, but when you know Pro Tools like the back of your hand and so do all of your colleagues and collaborators, when all of your hardware and software works with it seamlessly… how likely are you to change?
I’m not suggesting that this isn’t a problem by the way - vendor lock-in is a serious bugbear of mine - but it’s a very real barrier to getting creative professionals to switch to FOSS alternatives, and in turn to getting software vendors to take FOSS platforms seriously. It’s a reality that cannot be hand-waved away by saying that x or y tool works great and that people just need to learn it and switch so that they can use Linux. If you can’t run Pro Tools on Linux, that’s a whole industry that won’t use it. It’s that simple.
Nah, the only reason those tools are used are because of momentum and the fact that most of their new hires have experience with it, also due to momentum.
Ban Photoshop from being taught in schools, and in two generations everyone will say that Photoshop is crap because it takes so long to do anything.
I kind of feel like you just ignored everything I wrote.
This is definitely the take of someone who doesn’t need the full capabilities of such tools to make a living.
This is definitely the take of someone who learned Photoshop before learning Gimp and doesn’t understand its full capabilities.
You made me chuckle! I was raised on open source by a software engineer. I was using gimp on Ubuntu when I was 7 or 8 years old. I understand your sentiment completely, but you need to understand that time is money, and if something like layer blending takes even a few more clicks in gimp than photoshop, it is not ready to compete. Of course, you can think whatever you want about software you don’t rely on for a living. The rest of the world will smile and move on with reality.