Not long ago; there was a review released for MacGimp. It created a lot of controversy about GIMP, editors, and open source software. Many people had different opinions and it became quite a passionate debate online.
This debate was happening on many technology forums. While much of the debates consisted of just arguments and nothing factual; there were some good and bad points. As usual; Mac OS was attacked the most. There were some actual conversations about open source and graphic editors however.
MacGimp is based on GIMP. GIMP was started as open source software created by university students for a project. People could download it, change it, and re-upload it for people to use as they wished. Firefox was also created this way as well as many other programs.
UNIX and Linux culture seems to be where most of the open source software is coming from; which is why Mac OS is attacked so often by open source lovers and haters. While most open source software is changed for use on Windows or Mac OS; this isn’t always the case.
Mozilla could be considered a Mac OS application. It has a similar appearance and reacts the same way as other similar Mac programs. It is also a great program for web designers. It can be complicated to use for web designing and if that’s the case; users opt to use Netscape instead.
Mozilla’s popularity and stability as a browser has outpaced and outsold many other commercial browsers. It can be considered an open source success. It runs on almost all operating systems and it is free for everyone to download and use to their liking.
GIMP was designed for use on Linux. Unlike other open source programs; it has not been tuned to fit Mac OS yet and is still created primarily with Linux users in mind. This has upset many Mac OS users.
This makes it very difficult for Mac users to judge the product correctly because they have no experience with how Linux runs. They have no idea how to judge this graphics program to its full extent.
In order to make this product more commercially viable; it needs to be tuned to all operating systems; including the much hated Mac Os. By giving tools that can be used by all users the product will outpace the commercial competition which is the goal of open source software in the first place.