GIMP cannot compete with Adobe Photoshop. While you may be able to put WINE on a Linux computer and run a pirated version of Photoshop on your Linux machine, if you're doing everything above board, you still have to buy that Windows or Apple machine and pay a butt-load to Adobe if you're going to be a serious photographer.
What has happened in the world of software is that the bigger companies with the better products have completely obliterated the competition. Wherever you go to buy industry standard software there is monopoly publishing an excellent product at an inflated price. MS Office gets a few more bells and whistles every year, but it's your basic word processor and spreadsheet. The monkey-model (Home and Student) costs $150.00, while the professional version costs $300.00. There's no reason they need to bill that much, but they can, so they do.
One thing that really struck me is that a lot of industry specific software is completely primitive. The bread and butter software for synchronizing databases, customer accounts look like something borrowed from the 1980's, and believe me, this stuff is expensive. Five different companies in your town have hundreds of machines using this software, and it's all trying to integrate a few dozen Windows machines with a Unix server. It would probably be easier to have a company write the software for Linux, knowing their customers are going to pay for support, but companies cannot break out of their MS Office environments. They still have to communicate with other companies in the MS Office format.
The power of MS is astounding, when you come to think about it. You hear Republicans go on diatribes against governmental power, but who elected Microsoft? We are paying these companies handsomely for residuals. Patents are too complicated to go into, but copyright law was created before the typewriter. Think about that for a minute. Now think of all the trustfund babies that are living fairly luxurious lifestyles while hardly doing any meaningful work. This is what most of your software dollars are going for. We're paying for a new aristocracy. Bill Gates might not be simply giving his money to his children, but the B & M Gates Foundation is doing the kind of thing the Peace Corps used to. A small number of people are getting powerful enough to displace our government. Add to that the power of wealth to influence elections and the people who win our elections, the government starts to become exactly the type of foreign entity the Republicans characterize it as.
At some point, the government is going to get on top of the private entities vying to control it. The first way is that some individual or consortium are able to dominate the government so completely that they are able to impose their lackey at which point they invest that lackey with greater and greater power, until one day, their lackey is replaced with somebody they can't control. Conservatives try to make out the Nazis as "Socialists," but that was in name only. The Nazis bragged about not having any economic plan what so ever, and in fact, they were heavily financed by private companies like Krupps and multinationals like I.G. Farben. The 1930's were hard times, but somebody was buying a lot of nice, new brown shirts. Well, the companies supporting the NAZI Party didn't so much lose control as fell in line with Hitler. The Nazis never really went to a hard core socialist war economy, like we did right from the time we declared war on Japan. Roosevelt made sure the American People were serious about winning the war, while the German leadership was so out of it that at least one company was still making wallpaper, even as the Russians surrounded Berlin.
The other way is for the people to remember that the government is there to support their interests over the interests of a powerful few. When my mother died, my state legislator read into the legislative record his condolences for my family. Apparently, one of my siblings worked on his campaign. When my sister gave me the parchment that state documents are printed on, I thought about it for a long time. On one level, it looks like a politician paying back his cronies by producing some honorarium at state expense, but it goes a whole lot deeper. The basic unit of politics isn't the individual, but family Families provide the money and warm bodies to get politicians elected, which imposes the responsibility on the politician to act as a friend of the family. This means that our government is not composed of "them" but of "us." While there are those that make politics seem petty and ugly to keep people from putting their money behind politicians or going to the polls, there can be nothing more honorable in a republic than to stand behind your choice of representation. Otherwise, your representative will necessarily represent somebody else. If I may quote Lincoln, "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Just how the government will reign in companies like MS, I do not know. Market forces work in favor of the monopoly, so there has to be some outside actor. The government is the only thing I can think of, but then, the US is not the only country in the world that has a government. While we may delude ourselves that our irreverent society will keep coming up innovating the new things that will keep us on top, that's really wishful thinking. The Chinese can throw people at just about any problem. If the Chinese government wants to have Photoshop capabilities on the state Linux computers, they can put together the coders and develop the capability, and they can shrug off any patent suite that Adobe may present, just like the developers of television did the man who invented FM radio. China is moving slowly, but effectively to dominate the world. They are not as rash and violent as we are, but they are determined. Perhaps with their population, that dominance is inevitable. The thing is, that in competition with the Chinese people, I would like to think the US government promotes my interests. It doesn't. For the most part it seems that it supports the interests of the monopolists, who's short term interests lie with China. Of course, China will turn of them the moment their interests run contrary, but that is not today.
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