1830
I would argue Adobe lost more money from pirated Adobe apps than GIMP
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
1830 points (96.7% liked)
pics
26205 readers
299 users here now
Rules:
1.. Please mark original photos with [OC] in the title if you're the photographer
2..Pictures containing a politician from any country or planet are prohibited, this is a community voted on rule.
3.. Image must be a photograph, no AI or digital art.
4.. No NSFW/Cosplay/Spam/Trolling images.
5.. Be civil. No racism or bigotry.
Photo of the Week Rule(s):
1.. On Fridays, the most upvoted original, marked [OC], photo posted between Friday and Thursday will be the next week's banner and featured photo.
2.. The weekly photos will be saved for an end of the year run off.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://mastodon.world/about
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Isn't this called, "competition"?
Gimp, Paint.Net, VLC...
A little bit of hope for a future more like Star Trek and less like Wall-E.
They did not "lose" any money; they never had it
What they lost is potential customers
Right?
If I had no intention on buying your product, you didn't lose money.
If I pirate your product, you still didn't lose any money as I still had no intention on buying your product.
There are probably some people who decided to use GIMP instead of Photoshop, some people who simply pirated Photoshop, and some people who bought Photoshop anyway.
It's difficult to quantify the degree to which the existence of GIMP caused lost sales for Adobe. I started using GIMP instead of a high-seas Photoshop version, so I still haven't spent a dime!
The "losing money" argument is the same they use against media piracy.
Oil piracy though, no biggie so long as it's a big government doing it.
What many people don't think about is that open source / free software is anti-billionaire software.
Since all software is bits, and it's free and easy to copy bits, to make money from software, a company needs to build a "moat". A moat is something that protects your company from people choosing alternatives. Open source software is built without a moat, so that anybody and everybody can access it. And, if you build with the GPL anybody who builds something based on your software is forbidden from building a moat of their own.
This means that it's really hard to get rich building free / open source software. But, it also means that in any area where there is free / open source software it's much harder for fully commercial, closed source, for profit companies to make big profits. Enshittify too much and people will just switch to the alternative, even if the alternative is significantly less stable, not as easy to use, is lacking features, etc. Piss people off too much and they might actually invest engineering money on improving the open source alternative.
Adobe is a big company with their fingers in many different pies. Photoshop is only one of their products. Gimp alone can't do much to hold Adobe back, but it does limit what they can do with Photoshop and still expect to make money from it.
to make money from software, a company needs to build a “moat”.
No. There are other ways.
I've paid more for Free Software licensed software voluntarily than I ever did for proprietary software with its moats. Largely because they have no moat.
And has that made the people selling that software rich? No.
My point is that to get rich making software you need a moat. You can still make a bit of money without it, but it will be a fraction of what you can make if you can use intellectual property laws to make sure you don't have to worry about competitors.
This means that it’s really hard to get rich building free / open source software.
Red Hat, Canonical and others disagree.
Red Hat doesn't even exist anymore. They're nothing more than an IBM subsidiary. Canonical is hardly rich. It may be influential in the free software world, but in terms of market cap, they're half the size of "A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp". Have you ever heard of A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp? I hadn't until I started looking for software companies comparable to Canonical.
Meta is probably the biggest example of profiting from open source
Software licensing will eventually be relegated to the “dustbin of history”, hopefully it won’t be after humanity emerges from a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Yeah. Software licensing is artificial scarcity, trying to make the new world of bits seem like the old world of objects so that people who knew how to make money with objects can still make money with bits.
Are not the copyleft licenses the opposite of artificial scarcity, not just affirming that opposite, but also affirming to not impose that artificial scarcity later on, as a condition?
Even permissive licenses start from an absence of artificial scarcity. Even if though later on, forks can add their artificial scarcity.
Yes, that's the distinguishing feature of the GPL. The ironic thing is that the only thing that gives the GPL its power is the thing it's trying to fight. If IP laws didn't exist, the GPL would be unenforceable, but it would also be unnecessary.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Because of Adobe's hatred and abuse of their users, Adobe lost millions of dollars.
Corporate has a strategy to win those customers back, in all such industries, buy out your competition and enter into a shittrust with remaining competitors, agreeing to both maximize revenue rather than compete for favour.
Anti trust has been dead, courts have been captured, customers have no choice, stonk goes back ups.
load more comments
(2 replies)
There's also Krita if you're more of an artist
Maybe you mean a more "brush and canvas" interface without complexity and distraction. I'm an artist that uses gimp. They are both great, Krita is just made with ease of use and emulation of irl tools in mind. GIMP can do emulation stuff too, but it can also do tons of other things, even video fx and animation.
GIMP can do [...] video fx and animation.
Sounds like feature creep to me tbh.
Jehan Pages, you have bestowed my life with an abundance of badly edited memes and given me a trade that can I be proud of (making badly edited memes in Gimp), thank you.
Adobe hasn't lost anything, they have tied up "design" for any business use. Its a total monopoly.
Yeah, this is kinda BS.
Adobe don't care. Nearly every design firm is going to ask you about your Adobe experience, so you can use their Adobe software.
Maybe some of their designers will use GIMP. But that's like saying your office also uses libre office and Linux. Which is extremely rare.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(9 replies)
Legend.
A few of the replies here, those making those replies, could do with having someone introduce them to the concept of "put up or hack up", and getting into a Free Software philosophy mindset, and out of a consumer mindset.
GIMP's free software. Free to use, study, share and change... You the user are empowered. Even if you yourself lack aptitude (beyond just having never tried), you can still seek the services of others, be it those you pay to implement what you want, or, form a community of like minded individuals with similar needs to be met, and from there, start to make it as you want. These days, even LLMs can help curate the software into forms more suited to your needs. ... That is, where that's not already happened, or where there are reconfigurations you were simply not aware of, because it had not occurred to you to search for such, having been conditioned to stay in the box by the consumer mindset the corporation curated in your mind. It's refreshing to get out of having your mind curated by the corporation, and into using your mind to curate your software.
Either the user controls the software, or the user is controlled by the software and those who control the software.
It's a different philosophy. Not just a different platform for you as a "consumer". You're not a cash-cow for the corporation, with Free Software. You can contribute. Scratch those itches yourself. You may find others share the same itch. Giving back, is a much more rewarding experience than just hoping daddy corporation will give you what you want while you continue to atrophy your abilities.
Put up or hack up. ;)
load more comments
(4 replies)
I'm so thankful to people like Pages who work hard on free alternatives.
photogimp allowed me to abandon photoshop entirely, I vastly prefer my new adobe free workflow
Look... I like gimp a lot and Jehan is a G.
Adobe has lost basically nothing. Because Gimp is still ridiculously underpowered compared to Adobe Photoshop (let alone the rest of the suite). That is perfectly fine since the vast majority of users don't need those capabilities. But the people who do (e.g. professionals)? There is really no other choice.
load more comments
(11 replies)
all adobe needed to do was make one time purchase software and not subscription. The CC model is insane
Man ain't nobody lost money because of Gimp. Flawed argument aside, at least Blender could be in for a shout
Last year Blender got a shout out at the Oscars from the makers of Flow.
load more comments
(3 replies)
This is like movie companies saying that me pirating a movie cost them money.
Absence of a free thing isn't going to magic some money into my wallet with which to buy your thing, I'm still broke AF.
My gramma totally screwed Intel. She never used a computer in her entire life.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
I should mail this guy $5. Or, like, an edited image of a $5 bill with his face on it.
I know quite a few professionals that use GIMP and Inkscape just so they arent locked into the adobe ecosystem and monthly/yearly fees.
Lets make it billions!
view more: next ›