Has there been any talk in the open source community about creating (gathering) a collection of design applications into a suite similar to the Adobe Creative Suite? Right now there are a multitude of individual applications such as Gimp, Ink Scape, Scribus and many many more that compete with Adobe’s base collection. However, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a spin off of Libre Office for the design world so that we didn’t have to walk around with a creative cloud of ongoing fees and upgrades looming over our heads?
I have marked up the answer by @jiero as it is largely correct in terms of the philosophy that you get what you pay for. Your question however points to several other issues (and a general mis-conception about free / libre software).
Windows / Mac platform users have for years paid a hefty royalty to Adobe and now realise all it did was make a bad arrangement worse. The only thing I have to say about that (generally speaking, not to you specifically) is: welcome to the future you helped bring about. This Forbes article offers a decent account of the new cloud-based service Adobe is offering.
There are a great many pages on the web comparing the various open source offerings (some of which you mention) to the components in an Adobe suite. Here are a couple of random ones:
- Free Open Source Alternatives for Adobe Creative Suite
- Alternativas a Adobe Creative Suite en software libre y barato [in Spanish]
The general tone of such articles is often one of equating the components and features, but the real power of a tool suite is:
- Common file formats (ideally specified by a separate organisation).
- Interoperability / shared APIs.
- Flexibility in catering to different industries / workflows.
Some of these are touched on by articles like this one (refer the last two to three headings). This article (linked from the previous) offers a decent account of the difficulties in reaching agreement about the first two points (and control over these).
LibreOffice is rather unique in being a suite of applications that was originally developed by a single organisation, rather than a bunch of disparate groups. It also now has a separate body (OASIS) that manages the ODF specification. Generally speaking, open source software has a lot more in common with “disparate groups” (people wanting to scratch their own itch) than an organisational design-by-committee style of approach (as shown here). This is a great source of strength, however it requires changing one’s mind-set in order to fully appreciate it.
I sincerely doubt we will see a LibreOffice-like equivalent catering to the creative / design industry any time in the near future. The creative / design industry being “creative” though will mean it likely has a better chance of adapting to a new set of tools and workflows.
Thank you for your response. I guess my hope, albeit a futile one, is that through the essence of community we could create a unified set of tools, standards, principals that work for everyone but allow for growth for the individual. I would love to see this bridging industries, not just creatives, as a larger concept. I’m sure this all sounds hippy dippy, and i that I come across is a bit ignorant of the whole thing. Again, I see this is not practical as you have pointed out, but more ideal.
@kpcurt0 – Hiya!
I think the general idea of a “Libre Design Suite” could be a good one, but it sounds like a large undertaking. Big-picture discussion about LibreOffice can sometimes be on-topic for the Ask LibreOffice site, but this project seems a bit out of scope.
Do you have any specific ideas of how LibreOffice/TDF could/should be involved in some kind of integrated set of applications?
Are you going to pay FROM BEGINNING to subtract the difference on manpower?
If GIMP get fund same as 1/10000 of Photoshop’s Sales, this is(probably) enough to sponsor GIMP team for 1 year. The reality is 5 part-time (GIMP) vs 30 full-time (Photoshop).
Intergrate them all will need a lot of works, and what’s exactly wrong with individual applications? Inkscape lack of an option export to GIMP directly; Scribus don’t recognize SVG very well, etc.