On twitter recently I mentioned how I had once or twice been in the unfortunate situation of having to use GIMP and/or Inkscape. I also said they are fine if you have nothing else available.

This, of course, led to an amount of outcry from a few people defending these two software packages. It was all very civil, and actually kind of not as vocal as I had expected. But it was there. It’s always there. Then, of course, I was asked to explain what the usability issues are, and to file bug reports.

I don’t want to get into the specifics of what it is that makes me want to throw my computer out the nearest window whenever I have to use these applications.

And not having to explain this, is exactly why I pay for software.

I pay for someone else to tell the people who make it why it sucks. And I pay the people who make it to fix it.

Photoshop might be insanely overpriced, buggy, have an unnecessarily steep learning curve, have no free bug fix updates, an arcane copy protection system…. but at least I don’t have adobe on my back demanding I tell them about it. Or telling me to fix it myself.