"good enough for a good chunk of people" completely describes Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender, all of which are absolutely powerful and capable of (and actually used for) the highest level professional results.

That there are features and quality from the well-funded proprietary tools that are lacking in the free/open ones is undeniable. But the examples you chose are ones where if we had to use the free/open ones, we would be just fine. These are cases where free/open options are actually pretty darn nice.

> "good enough for a good chunk of people" completely describes Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender

I said that keeping in mind professional use. There are some people who can effectly replace Office with LibreOffice at work and the number is significant.

However, when you try to do the same with a designer then Gimp, Inkscape and Blender falls behind, so yeah... A dev could do a minor manipulation on an image using Gimp, but don't ask a designer to produce a print-ready poster using it.

Yeah, but "print-ready posters" ain't the only professional use for raster graphics software anymore. GIMP (in my experience, at least) works quite well for digital work; it's only print work that it's significantly lacking (particularly due to the lack of proper CMYK support).

Surely they would use a vector graphics program for such a task? Although I'm not a designer I certainly do (Inkscape) and would hate to try to produce a poster with a raster graphics program.

Hey on the bright side, just look how far we have already got without too much financial incentives!!

My motivation for using libre software is:

- When you use a proprietary software, you are using "somebody else's software, licensed for your usage".

- When you are using libre software, you are using YOUR software.

Software built for profit have better incentives for financial development support, and that's why it's hard for libre software to catch up on features.

We can support libre software with donations (or better not giving money to the locked competence), and more importantly using the libre software that lacks of the non-vital features, at least at personal level.

In the long run, libre will outlast the locked, it's a matter of financial incentives.

If Microsoft did not advise OEM's to preinstall Windows, the cheapest desktops and laptops would be those with a GNU/Linux distro (no Windows license). Then perhaps Linux would have a wider adoption on the desktop.

And if Linux had any significant market share (I'd say even 10-20%) you would have native Linux versions of most of that software - not entirely unlike what you have on OS X.

Edit: clarified.

You are missing the point. "Proprietary system" here means Windows.

All these applications could run under Linux just fine if the vendors cared.

And what leads to the vendors caring? Demand.

There is no demand for this software on linux. Professionals have better things to do than choose their software based on ideology.

But professionals now have a very good, non-ideological reason to choose a Linux OS over Windows. How many professionals are comfortable with an operating system that collects and sends everything they load, type or save to Microsoft and their corporate and government partners?

Has it actually been proven that this happens? Vague wording in a EULA isn't proof.

In some cases (e.g. legal and medical services) the very potential may be illegal in some countries -- and the proof could lose not just someone's business but their license to practice.

Any good examples of closed source applications being financially successful on Linux? How do the opportunities on Linux compare with investing in applications for other platforms?

It's not so much about "caring" as about the ability to pay programmers to create profitable software.

I think TurboPrint is pretty successful. It is a good printing system. I purchased it many years ago and it is still available to this day.

http://www.turboprint.de

More commercial applications:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proprietary_commercia...

http://lin-app.com

http://www.techdrivein.com/2011/05/10-commercial-apps-for-li...

http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxCommercialApplications...

Thanks for the links, but it doesn't look very promising.

YoLinux looks old and has some non-working links, so I'm not sure it's being maintained. (Indeed, one link leads to Windows and Mac OS X software, not Linux.)

Lin-App, the most promising site, hasn't updated "What's up" since 15.04.2011. (Also, its most recent comments are 2 and 11 months ago.)

As it says in the URL, the TechDriven story is also from 2011, and the programs are from Lin-App.

It's hard to see the signs of a vibrant ecosystem....

Linux + proprietary 3D graphics software is very popular in large shops (ILM, Pixar, DreamWorks, etc.). 3D graphics, CAD, etc. in general tends to have much stronger roots in the Unix world (by way of IRIX, with GNU/Linux being the most common migration path) than Windows.

Basically, for the big names in computer-animated movies, the Year of the Linux Desktop has already happened.

Yes, that market looks healthy, as far as I can see....

Matlab does quite well?

Runs on Windows and Mac OS X as well, so it's a good cross-platform example. But there's no way to tell how much money it makes from each OS....

Loads. Mainly very expensive high end niche scientific packages (scientists tend to use Linux at a higher percentage than ordinary people so the market percentages are more favourable).

I'm thinking stuff that is available on Linux as well as Windows/OSx.

Examples include Matlab, the Avizo image analysis suite, a certain simulation package that was described as AllSIM in a controversial discussion relating to CERN last week on HN and Maya (not scientific but it does illustrate the sort of high end very expensive niche stuff that tends to have Linux versions).

Steam

Linux users are only 0.89% of the Steam user base, which is 95.79% Windows....

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Inkscape and Illustrator is unfair. My work has stopped buying Illustrator licenses and no one even noticed because Inkscape does what we need.

Inkscape is nice and I use it all the time, but I am not a designer so it works for me just fine (I suspect is the same case in your office).

On the other hand, my sister is a designer, and there are so many missing features on Inkscape that prevent her to use it in her profession life. The comparison seems unfair, but it is the closest thing to an alternative for Illustrator in the software free world.

I find that many programmers find Inkscape or Gimp more than enough for their graphic needs, but it's really hard to come across a designer that would agree. Nobody likes to pay and pirate software; if designers found Gimp really up to the task, they would be rushing to use it and drop the Adobe monthly fee. The fact that this mass migration is not happening and has never happened in the past 10 years should tell us more than our own understanding of graphic tools would let us deduce.

I think that for a professional designer a £15 (or whatever it is now) monthly charge that can probably be expensed or tax offset anyway is small compared to learning a new UI or the potential difficulties that can arise when handing a non-Adobe file to a print shop.

What Adobe have achieved with photoshop is become the de facto standard for many aspects of design and image work. They have done this through a mixture of (1) being the best practical option and (2) some vendor lock in. We may not like it but well done to them.

Well, the limitations for GIMP in Print work is obvious and already mentioned above, but also consider the fact that "Photoshop" looks far better on a designers resume than being an expert in GIMP.

Gimp is fairly good, but still a few years behind Photoshop (realized this hard truth during a recent work).

On the other hand, Maya is available on Linux !

Edit: typos

FWIW, I prefer GIMP at work when Photoshop is also already available to us. I still stick to GIMP because of its ease in scripting and automating my work via PyGimp. I'm aware Photoshop can script via AppleScript, VBScript, and JavaScript, but Python just makes more sense to me.

And not on the automation side, I have also created professional quality icons on GIMP used on our web application.

Proprietary system as in Operating System, not proprietary applications.