@stacksofplates said in Why Free Open Source Software Is Cheaper Than You Think:
@john-nicholson said in Why Free Open Source Software Is Cheaper Than You Think:
@stacksofplates There are other costs to GIMP (I've used it, honestly prefer Paint.NET).
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Training. There are a bazillion classes, youtube videos, books, and even college courses that include photoshop. GIMP has significantly less available in this realm and while it has some free content it's less than 1% of what is out there for PS.
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Sunk Cost software - Photoshop for many is a sunk cost (They own it, have an Adobe subscription for Illustrator or other things you use, their company has paid for it). This also extends into arguments for why you should leave other commercial products when you already have an ELA etc for given software.
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Sunk Cost Training - If my staff knows how to use PS or other software, and has 5000 hours of experience with it, it's going to take a while for them to switch to GIMP. Even at 200 hours of lost productivity or slow work to get back up to speed on GIMP, if my labor is at $150 an hour (what I got quoted for a conversion job recently) It's going to cost me 30K to switch to GIMP.
Im not arguing with any of that. What I'm saying is 99.9% of the times I've seen someone say they can't use Linux because they can't use Photoshop they didn't need it. They aren't graphics professionals and rely on stolen/hacked versions of PS to do their work.
If you really need it you really need it, no argument there. But some hipster who "needs" it so he can make a new age poster for his craft beer room doesn't really "need" it.
When I was a storage admin it was pretty much impossible to do your job with Linux. Way too many windows specific dependencies. Even when I carried a MAC I ran Fusion to keep a windows VM for stuff.
Now that I'm at VMware 99% of our stuff is web based internally and we have a SSO portal (Workspace one) that I can sign into once a day and get into anything (even my 401K and external stuff).
Still, I do feel the need for a Full version of outlook (The web version has some issues and workflows are weird for some stuff), OneDrive and other tools to work with my team.
My podcasting and video production stuff (Camtasia, Audio Hijack) lacks anything of reasonable quality on Linux. Also, I collaborate with team members and we use proprietary project file formats for the editing and exporting to MP4 would lose the layering stuff.
I have to use Lync/S4B plugins to get on conference calls with some companies (The web version of this suck horribly).
I used to do a TON of EUC stuff (VDI Architect) and the reality is that on any OS or end user computer project all it takes is a SINGLE application not working for a project to fail.