GIMP is a good alternative to Photoshop for someone like me, who is not a professional designer, just someone who needs to touch up an occasional picture. So what GIMP has done is removing my "need" to run an illegal copy of Photoshop (a practice I really hated and stopped with a long time ago). If I'm a professional user of anything, I should be ready to pay for it. Else hard to claim I'm a professional.

What the article should acknowledge is the difference between an alternative and the shift of which tool is... the gold standard.