I think it is true that people prefer local products. I read your sentence as if you meant that Japanese people choose CSP and SAI solely out of patriotism. I apologize for the bias in my interpretation.
That is a very good point, I’ve probably done that on my digital art blog (The Art Squirrel) at some point, although I do generally aim the blog toward beginners and people who might be new to digital art.
I know Krita is a good one for beginners and pros, I personally use Krita. I keep trying to get my sister who does professional comic book coloring work to use it instead of her old Photoshop version because it is so much better.
Personally I don’t care if people find is a nuisance to hear me talk about open source stuff don’t talk to me then about software. But because of this to think I can’t open files from other software… That is the most silly thing I ever heard and I take personal offense in that.
I adapt to any studio requirements in less than a month. I learnt AE and 3D studio Max that way and still found myself teaching their tech lead 3DS Max after that has been on the job over 20 years on the field. Because you only serve one program like a God you only know one thing and have the bad habits of it. I don’t care about cool you think it is I saw all of them and converted back to Open Source.
If anything people in open source are the ones that are not blinded by faith they are just annoying for the most part. Faith in Adobe, faith in Autodesk, faith in the Industry Standard. Just go to any forum and you will hear it, speak to them and you will hear it they just don’t like to know you don’t believe in their faith too…
Truth is over time standards for software has changed and there is no way open source will not become standard at some point. Many companies already use it they just don’t make show reels about it because there is no marketing around it.
I can use most 3d programs and 2d programs however don’t expect me to buy a license to a program I don’t want to use personally, if studio provides me the license I will use it. If they need a file when I am outside it you will receive a conversion. I will not buy to convert a image file and to send a comp for others sounds like they are paying good enough for a license I feel.
I have literally tryed every possible program that is worth while as industry standard and below and by far Blender and Krita are the most driven projects. And other professional projects are currently trying to keep up to stay relevant.
In 2D Autodesk drawing program died out already last year and it was heavily regardard as an industry standard. 
Thing is you can’t kill Krita unlike other softwares. Like Mischief that should have been the big thing in 2D but yeah dead, but the code is there rotting. Ahead of its time. It was a big loss Mischief.
As a person on open source I believe you have tryed other programs at least. Like here people must have at least tested PS and CPS at some point even if in a trial or a pirated one. If they are payed they should be better right ? And then taken a look at it. That thought must have gone though everyone’s mind in here. People with payed software only don’t though because they are getting their money’s worth right?
And as for translations. I have had this discussion before. Learn English. If your a person on the internet and you don’t know English I don’t know what to say. I have learnt some Japanese too but I am not exposed to it enough to recall it much nowadays. I am Portuguese and when I hear someone they can’t speak another language because it is not their native tongue I feel sorry for them at least try… Everyone here I bilingual or trilingual and hearing you speak only one confuses me to the core and I don’t care. Being dum is optional.
My bottom line is if you can’t adapt you will be left behind. No matter how relevant you are now.
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I agree with you that Krita is suitable for beginners and advanced users. I think my annoyance lies in those who recommend Krita as only a beginner program.
“Use Krita then move on” 
this sort of message gives me an iffy feeling.
Thanks for linking your blog! It’s always a pleasure to read about art 
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Thats weird, In the french community its totally in reverse. Krita is seen as a software for advanced users since its complexity is on par with Photoshop (which is considered the pro software here) , no one recommends it for beginners and thus a lot of them dont want to use it because the complexity scares them off
Agreed. You learn very early on the internet that if you want to find quality info and discussion, you NEED to learn english. There is no other way. While complaining about the lack of translation is valid, and documentation and tutorials should be available in most languages, people need to be reminded when they use any software that they will find more tutorials and documentation in english. This is for every software, wether its adobe products, foss software etc.
“Most people use Floss for ideological reasons” Really? I Know you are probably exagerating but people I know who use FLOSS do it because it was the more viable solution compared to paid software, not because its free and open and therefore the “better” software.
Yes, maybe some people are a little too pushy about trying out FLOSS, I have seen it in person, but “burden on society” and “cult like”, just, No.
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But why not ideological reasons too? I had to install Photoshop for a recent job (because the client wanted full editable layers) and I didn’t have any control over the stuff Adobe installed on my computer (it even installed a folder named “Adobe affiliate/partners” or something similar). I only wanted Photoshop but had to create an account, give my credit card for the free trial period, install all sorts of creative cloud apps … And even then, Photoshop didn’t open for a couple of times because it wasn’t recognising my login credentials. How could that be possible, not being able to use the software we paid for. It looks like the artist/user is the less important part of the equation for Adobe (they are not empowering the artists, we are empowering them).
I recently installed and tried CSP and it didn’t seem that different. I had lots of unknown apps and folders and scripts that I had to manually remove afterwards.
Beyond all that, Adobe and Celsys don’t seem to care about what the users want.
I don’t know a single piece of software that is perfect, but ideological reasons matter too in my opinion, because in these times where concerns about privacy are real, it feels strange to give so much just to use a software (that you don’t really own).
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Not owning the software you paid for already impacted a lot of people in different instances like described here:
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@Takiro Didn’t know about that. How is that even possible, to change the contract unilaterally without any kind of consequences…
@oliver Consequences for a non-agreed change to a contract would be decided by a court.
A US court is not likely to do anything to Adobe if they can show they were acting according to presidential decree and US law.
A Venezualan court may take a dim view of the situation but what can they do to Adobe?
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I guess government intervention was not considered in their contract but I have no idea how this works.
Similar things have also happened for example because of Brexit. It affected the company where I work and we had to change our software and contracts too, even though we are not located in the UK. This can basically happen to anyone.
The ultimate consequences for Adobe’s case were that a lot of companies were rethinking if they truly need adobe products and switched to other software. I have seen quite a few artists on Twitter switching to Krita (and other tools) because of that, even artists from other countries since if it can happen to Venezuela, it can happen to any country.
Edit: not everyone switched to FOSS some just wanted to get away from US based companies.
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Hi, just read your feedback on Opentoonz.
You can try out Tahoma 2D,which is probably more artist friendly fork of Opentoonz.
(just like Bforartist, which is more artist friendly fork of Blender.)
You can also get english documentation at Tahoma 2d site.
I have been trying to learn & experiment with tahoma 2d for last 4-5 months and I find it interesting !
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CSP sales and user numbers are higher than Adobe’s. In terms of digital painting, CSP is the standard, contrary to the opinion of some people here.
And people who say “I don’t care if I’m an annoyance” are exactly the reason why OpenSource right now is only successful as the base of commercial applications used by the company as free labor.
There are exceptions, but not AOSP is successful, Android is. Not Chromium is successful, Google Chrome is. Not FreeBSD is successful, macOS is and the list goes on.
If a new artist uses Google or YouTube to find the best painting program, you’ll end up with CSP or SAI. If Krita is mentioned, than as a free alternative for beginners who can’t out don’t want to buy the bigger tools.
Krita is way more than that and Krita can do things CSP or SAI can’t do. It’s the same with Linux.
Linux is an excellent Kernel, but for the majority of people it’s not usable because the userpsace and desktop environment is designed by developers, not a company.
Celsys says “Implement that feature due to customers demand in that way or you’re fired” and they will implement it.
Open a Bug report at the Krita Bug Tracker and say “please implement that feature or our studio can’t use Krita” and you’ll get a response like “Patches are Welcome” or “then don’t use it then, we are free software yada yada”
If there is a issue with the Software or incompatibility with some hardware or whatever, you can’t call a number and someone will support you.
For me personally, Krita is the perfect solution but I can totally understand why the majority of people just want a working solution and doesn’t care if it’s free. If there is a Bug in Krita that causes a crash, the company will say it’s your issue for choosing Krita.
If there is a Bug in CSP, there is nothing you can do about and the are contracts with CSP and insurances who cover everything.
The year of the Linux Desktop never came even though having been announced several times and it will never come. GIMP never replaced Photoshop in 2005, not in 2010 nor 2012 or 2017.
It’s 2021 now and still GIMP haven’t replaced Photoshop and it never will. It’s roughly 25 years in development and haven’t made it yet. Ardour never replaced Cubase and Krita will never replace CSP.
And I personally think it’s a good thing because the most successful FLOSS projects, sooner or later, turn into commercial ones and then the Fork Fest begins and users are just getting more pissed off.
And with Qt as it’s base, Krita is already in trouble being dependent on an commercial acting company who is showing signs of “we need to make money, FLOSS will be more and more limited in the future”.
I don’t know how much you already worked with big corps but they are just as likely to say “eff you” when you report bugs or need help as any FOSS developer although the corporations are better at telling you to piss off without you noticing. I had several experiences with Amazon, BMW and some other Motorcycle brands our company worked with. From my experience, the bigger the corp the more likely they are to shit on your if it’s anything beyond basic FAQ help questions (because why should they waste time with you, you are just a rounding error for them). Again a lot of your anti FOSS arguments could just as well be anti closed source commercial software. The rest is “Million dollar corporations roll out fixes and features faster than FOSS teams with less than 10 devs and basically no funding”. Well, duh.
Based on what exactly? Do you have a source for this? It doesn’t match any of the statistics I have seen.
The closest I found was this quote on their website “Winner of the 2015/2016/2017/2019 “BCN Award” in the graphics software category, calculated by sales data on Amazon and other mass retailers.It is also the most popular software among users of pixiv, the world’s largest social media service for artists with over 40 million users.*”
But you see, there is a big gotcha with those word games. Most of sales of things like Adobe aren’t through amazon or any big retailer. Even more so now that they do subscriptions. And only thing is they have a largest base at pixiv, which is a japanese art community.
No one is arguing that CSP isn’t big in japan, and they aren’t so small outside of Japan, but they aren’t the biggest by far. That is the thing about demographics, some things may seem much bigger than it actually is when it is all around you in your demographic but that doesn’t mean it reflects the actual global landscape.
According to their wesbite “Since its launch in 2012, more than 10 million people have used this paint tool”. If that is the case, if you exclude Japan user base, I’d venture even Krita may come close in actual user usage. (Based on: “Krita currently is at 3,000,000 downloads a year from krita.org, which excludes downloads from external download sites or Linux distribution installs.” and " Krita has, according to data from Microsoft, which counts every time an exe is started on Windows 10, 1,500,000 active users (that is, distinct systems on which Krita is started at least once a month)")
There is nothing wrong with commercial open source. While there are conflicting opinions, I’d still rather see companies use open source “free labor or not”, then closed properietary.
Google search results are tailored towards your search history and location. Doing a clean search here in the US, CSP or SAI aren’t that prominent on the results.
Well, it is used in Android and in routers, alongside smart tvs, and many other stuff. But if you mean for the desktop. Many linux distributions are pretty easy to use these days. But the hard to use stereotype still remains. And of course there is the software compatibility stuff. Sure, linux has plenty of alternatives just as good but people are used to looking for certain stuff. Maybe its less important these days cause most people really only care about having a browser, but end of the day, most manufacturers bundle windows. And even if they offer linux, it will be hidden somewhere or only on their most expensive models.
The only way someone would get such a response is if they would give an attitude. Normally, the responses are fairly courteous.
But the big difference here is precisely that if you need a feature, you can add it yourself or your company can hire someone to add it. With commercial software, you are out of luck.
We agree here
Does it need to come? The world is moving more and more away from the desktop to mobile, web and virtualization. As low latency 5g and so one becomes common place and we hit the limits of die-shrinks, the future of computing is pretty much everyone having access to a thin/zero client and virtualize their software on the cloud.
And linux is doing pretty darn good in the server marketshare. This is why MS gave up their battle trying to supress linux and instead focusing more to move to cloud services.
The company I work for is exactly in this situation. Our product is fairly established (old 
) and uses a commercial framework that was popular for the used language 30 years ago. We are currently porting and rewriting things to modern technology but you can’t just rewrite a software with 30 years of combined development time in a few years. In the meantime we struggle to keep the current version alive for until the new software is done and even would push patches to the old framework to extend its lifetime but it’s closed source and the license is restricted. Patches are rare because the original devs literally die out, we fear that it dies with the devs and no one’s left to continue it.
I know this is off topic but I thought it’s an interesting real world example for your argument.
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I agree partly to @vamp898 . I have no numbers but I feel that Clip Studio is recognized as much photoshop. Their marketing is clever and has been proven successful. They offer monetary reward to those who can create the best CSP tutorials and created a currency that centers around their software. This effectively creates a community that supports them.
I have tested Krita and CSP and most brushes can be coverted to a very similar version. The difference is in the user experience. CSP has sliders and graphs and Krita has many properties with more properties and a graph for each property 
oh and sliders too.
My personal experience is that after learning Krita, I could learn other software easier. I thank Krita for teaching me perseverance 
through bugs and what not.
In the end, there’s no true winner. It’s like an apple and an orange contesting to be the best fruit.
I saw the strength of Krita’s community once I joined here. To see the new brush textures transform from a topic to merge request was eye opening.
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Back in the KDE 4.10 times I gave KDE to 5 or 6 non Linux users (one admin) and the first thing that happened to all of them was, when they wanted to close a window in the task bar, they deleted the widget that shows a list of opened Windows and they weren’t able to bring that back. So 5 of them re installed Linux altogether because they couldn’t figure out the solution and no longer had a task bar.
I told the KDE developers that most likely 0,1% is all users actually want to delete the list of open windows, most people just want to close a window and nothing more and that this is a big designed flaw.
They disagreed with me and told me, it’s the fault of the user for clicking the button. It took almost 10 years for them to realize they have to change this behaviour.
And in my personal experience, even big companies do care about feedback, even Google and AMD do.
They won’t change things they don’t want to change for good reasons like causing them a loss of income.
They don’t care if you are the 0,1% who wants to delete the list of open windows, yes, that’s true. But as someone who is working as an admin since 11 years with mostly big companies up to 130’000 employees I can say, big companies do care but they always calculate cost and usage.
And I don’t care if Linux is the base of Android, it helps me nothing. It’s an pure ideologic/religious reason to like that, not an technical one and Google would instantly stop using Linux in Android if the cost/value is no longer given. They use Linux because it’s costs their development cost and they stop using it at the point where this is no longer given.
I’m not an religious person, I care for the best technical solution and if an proprietary company is able to heal cancer with proprietary technology, I’d just thank them and pay. I won’t and never will use the worse technology just because it’s free. I would prefer that the best technology is FLOSS and if I have an option, I choose FLOSS, but if not, it’s not an option for me to resign because this won’t improve anything and just hinder progress of my personal life and the society.
In the end, Microsoft pays the salary of 168’000 people and is rewarded multiple times for providing best and way over the standard working conditions.
That doesn’t mean that Microsoft is a good company or everything they do is good. The real world is complicated and full of compromises and considerations to take.
The majority of artists would have no advantage when they would switch to Krita except for religious ones, that is why they don’t and the proprietary solutions for drawing are able to make a living for a lot of people (Adobe employs almost 23’000 people).
If Krita will be the best solution (which is almost impossible without getting millions in donations to employ lots of people for a longer time) it will win. But I it doesn’t need to. Krita is an important part of the software world in all aspects exactly the way it is. In the end it will improve things by its existence and that is what counts for me. It causes progess in a lot of indirect ways.
Many years ago, at another company, users deleted whole network drives and did other weird stuff, even on windows because apparently on MacOS you unmount drives by moving them to trash and many other things are different too for some reason. So what’s your point? Linux bad because things work different? What I see is that employees didn’t get the teaching they should get for any new software or OS, free or not. When we introduce a new tool to our employees we first evaluate it, test it with a few users and only then introduce it to everyone else and teach them everything or at least they have to shadow someone. As an Admin for 11 years you should know not to give users a software they never used, whatever it is, and expect them to magical understand everything important and unique about it.
I agree that Linux often has made questionable UX designs sometimes inconsistent, that’s the downside of distributed development where opinions on design are different and there is no single authority setting the course. But I have seen a lot of commercial software with shitty UI and UX too (famously the different versions of Windows 10 control center because apparently they couldn’t decide on whether use the new or old design).
It’s funny that you grant this right to companies but frown uppon it when it’s done in OSS. OSS devs may not lose income but time (and time is money, right?). Time fixing an UX quirk is often better spend fixing bugs or implementing an important feature that the software needs.
You made some good points in your first post but now everything just reads like a rant about FOSS devs not working according to your liking and “why bother using FOSS when it’s mostly shit anyway” (that’s how you sound).
And comparing FOSS to religion is just nonsense, unless you don’t know what religion even means. And even if it were true, I see nothing wrong in wanting to provide free software to people who couldn’t otherwise afford it. 50 bucks for a PS subscription maybe isn’t much for you but when I was young that was all I had left for food for a month after paying rent and everything. Paying for software was not an option.
Perhaps the “year of the Linux desktop” never comes but who cares unless your point is devs should rather spend their time only on stuff that makes loads of money.
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Well your argument is FOSS is not used by majority, and it is hard to use, so we should not use it and that is why most people won’t use it. Okay. With that attitude there won’t be Krita, nor any FOSS app since people won’t use it why develop it right? We all can switch to CSP and be done with it. I wonder if CSP people thought about it like this. Hey photoshop is the market leader nobody will use our app why make it?
Earlier people mocked blender like that too, but I see nowadays all the Cinema4D experts crawling and learning it and sharing their A, B, C’s done it in on social media like children. They are now starting to take it seriously ditching Cinema 4D etc. Now if blender devs read the reviews by these people and their opinion that they gave ages ago while worshipping cinema4D they would surely be demotivated to work on blender.
Similarly, nobody is forcing anybody to use FOSS. It is their choice. Maybe the same people who use CSP today will be opportunistic and rally behind Krita if it gives them something for free who knows.
And I had adobe creative suite licence subscription, I was the among the early adopters when they changed to the cloud pricing model. Guess what one day they messed up, charged my card twice for two months in a row and due to a glitch I couldn’t open my psd files for 1 and 1/2 days. I lost a client in the process. And I contacted them on their forums, wrote emails and also on messaged them on Twitter all I got was a customer service reply and not a solution. That incident lead me to find alternatives. We all have our anecdotes. Your belief is that FOSS is dead, and it won’t be any good in future, so who cares, let it be, those who use FOSS can use it whenever they want as it is free. When we get burnt we learn what fire is, and then we search for better things. FOSS will always be there people will come around when they want.
As I said earlier we are just going in circles with this discussion. The topic in itself will go nowhere. Those who support FOSS will give some example and those who oppose will say some counterpoints, it will keep ongoing like this
P.S regarding the patches welcome gripe, If the studio has money (which they surely will have considering they are ready to spend on proprietary counterparts) they can hire someone and develop the feature if they want. After all they are not paying anything else they can try to pay for what feature they need right.
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Windows 10… 
Working on Windows 2016 servers at the office, that’s even worse because you have more advanced settings and then even more different tools/windows and the same thing can be configured differently in different place 
Working on a big international company too with more than 200,000 employees for more than 10 years now, you don’t want to know all things I saw for which result 
The comparison is not fair.
First, I have a doubt that Celsys (or Adode) implement every feature that can be asked from users: it would probably be impossible (costs, delay, too many requests, incompatible requests… they have to make choices and prioritize which functionalities to implement)
But you said there’s 130 people working on CSP.
In comparison you only have 10people working on Krita.
So yes “patch are welcome”, but money is welcome too 
Can’t just ask for something for free because you need it, especially if you’re talking about a “studio” company. If I’m not wrong, they can pay for things they really need in Krita, I think some functionalities in Krita has already been sponsored by some companies.
Also, even with money you can’t implement anything just because some people want it: take a look on forum, for some functionalities (especially animation) you’ll find different requests “It would be cool to have the interface like this with this functionality”.
So different users thinking the same functions with different interfaces: that’s just impossible to satisfy one without disappointing the other.
Concerning the original question about why people don’t switch to open source alternatives, the subject is quite complex and many things have probably to be taken in account; it seems really difficult for which reason people use or don’t use FOSS:
-
user educational and cultural environment
I think people from Norway don’t think like people from Japan, or US, or India, or France, or Brazil, or…
I don’t want to made a “generality” because it would be stupid, but I’m sure that according to the country you’re coming from, FOSS software is statistically more a less used than from other countries (tried to find stats to confirm this feeling, but only found github contribution per country which is still an indicator) -
user social level
–you’ve have lot of money, you’ll probably buy an iStuff from banana’s store
–you don’t have money to buy iStuff? having an iStuff made you a fashion person because iStuff product is hype and you need it because everyone wants it and having it will let people think you’ve have money (you just sell a kidney to buy it) -
user social media
If you are “a Photoshop master”, you probably will have more followers than if you’re a “not-very-well-known other software master” (even is final produced result have the same quality) -
user habits and practice
Always used this OS or this software (at school, at office) and then too afraid to change habit and learn new things
So just continue to use well known software -
computer skills level
Just take a look on forum, and sometime you’ll see that just basic computer usage is already hard for some people… don’t even think to talk about FOSS, some are already lost just to download a binary to install…
-
state of mind
That’s sure there’s people who only think FOSS per principle.
But I think that’s a minority.
You can find people using FOSS software not because they’re fundamentalist of open source like R.S, but just because they’ve found an alternative that is working -
personal story
For some people who already tried alternative OS/software, if -for any reason- experience was bad one day, they’ll never try again, 1 month, 1 year or 10 years later -
…
I think we can continue this list (available language, platform, knowledge, interested/not interested, bugs, document&support level, user interface, feelings, age, …)
Another thing is basically, a user already using Linux (whatever the reason why Linux is used) will not have many choice: try to run a CSP or Photoshop on Linux, there’s no product available 
And for people using alternatives to Linux and FOSS, if they’re satisfied with their solution and don’t have any problem using it, I can understand they don’t try to look around.
Grum999
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