No matter how large the lead may be today, autodesk (and next-in-line Adobe) are case studies in why OSS will always win given enough time because although OSS can suffer from many chronic and debilitating diseases, they rarely catch the fatal ones that plague commercial software development.
Yes, the OSS development structure leads to projects that lag behind proprietary solutions for amounts of time that are measured in decades, but nobody will ever have to re-write GIMP from scratch because the market had a bad hair day and somebody got acquired by a sovereign wealth fund that gets bored and runs the project into the ground. That doesn't change anything about the fact that e.g. GIMP, or freeCAD suck today, but someone(s) will almost certainly still be carrying those torches in 50 years, or the torches of superior FOSS competitors. And in the next 50 years, Adobe and Autodesk will almost certainly suffer total death or become skeleton crews that only service legacy clients, and when that happens, all of the collective human talent that went into building those tools and human experience into mastering their use will burn up into the screaming void while GIMP chugs along, putting out a release candidate for their GTK4 port.
GIMP is just hot garbage, speaking from personal experience. All workflows are destructive, the layer workflow is pointy and annoying in so many small and big ways. Performance is bad as well. Small example, take a piece of text and rotate it. After you have rotated it, it no longer is a piece of text it's a slightly blurry piece of pixels. Want to rotate it again? It's now an even more blurry piece of pixels, getting blurrier every time you rotate it. Want to change the text? Start from scratch. Like come on those are the basics and they suck. Personally I don't see it getting a fundamental overhaul, simply because many users are used to the existing workflows and would be upset. I see real competition coming from other projects. But who knows, in general I agree with the sentiment that OSS' endurance is much better.
Personally I don't see it getting a fundamental overhaul
Have you looked at latest release of GIMP? It's just gotten a fundamental overhaul, including support for non-destructive workflows and better text tools. Still has a long way to go obviously and is moving very slowly, but changes are happening.
I don't know whether it will pan out, or whether other major issues will prevent GIMP from ever reaching the status that Blender has gotten to, but GIMP 3 has started shipping some non destructive filters (https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.0.html#non-destruc...) and I (from a distance) understand moving to NDE to be a long term goal of the project
On the contrary I wouldn’t write Autodesk off anytime soon. I’ve recently gotten into the 3d printing hobby and Fusion is not miles ahead of oss offerings, it’s in a different galaxy and it has a very generous free tier for folks like me.
Most importantly I don’t see a cross section between oss developers and cad teams to drive the collaborative features. I don’t think the critical mass to get this going exists.
> Most importantly I don’t see a cross section between oss developers and cad teams to drive the collaborative features. I don’t think the critical mass to get this going exists.
Replace CAD with 3D modelling and animation and that was my genuine opinion 15 years ago about Blender.
That being said, OSS projects can definitely go in the wrong direction but since history is preserved, at least someone else can come and fork before the codebase takes the wrong direction.
Open source CAD has improved a lot in the last few years. You can use FreeCAD for modelling simple parts today and it mostly works. That wasn’t the case a few years ago.
There was a time KiCAD was a buggy mess. And no doubt blender as well.
Blender is rock-solid and very smoothly usable, and as a beginner, I won't find anything missing or buggy. It would take a beginner years to get to the limitations, corner cases and broken things.
KiCAD is solid, very usable, but not totally smooth. The workflow is still far away from blender-like total integration and bliss. Where ten years ago you could find the occasional bug, a beginner won't find any nowadays.
FreeCAD only just last year started shipping releases that don't nullpointer after 2 minutes. Even a beginner with a trivial project will stumble over bugs, limitations, problems and design flaws.
There is a huge difference in quality, and KiCAD will get to Blender levels certainly. But FreeCAD will take forever, if the pace continues like that.
FreeCAD is built on top of Open Cascade and I think that’s what’s going to limit them. It was a fast way to get to v1, but there’s only so much that project can do to work around the limitations of the library they built on.
Yes, the OSS development structure leads to projects that lag behind proprietary solutions for amounts of time that are measured in decades, but nobody will ever have to re-write GIMP from scratch because the market had a bad hair day and somebody got acquired by a sovereign wealth fund that gets bored and runs the project into the ground. That doesn't change anything about the fact that e.g. GIMP, or freeCAD suck today, but someone(s) will almost certainly still be carrying those torches in 50 years, or the torches of superior FOSS competitors. And in the next 50 years, Adobe and Autodesk will almost certainly suffer total death or become skeleton crews that only service legacy clients, and when that happens, all of the collective human talent that went into building those tools and human experience into mastering their use will burn up into the screaming void while GIMP chugs along, putting out a release candidate for their GTK4 port.