Opinion

How GNOME betrayed the entire FOSS movement by using Adobe software

Paul Nixer

Paul Nixer

— 5 min read
How GNOME betrayed the entire FOSS movement by using Adobe software
Photo by Szabo Viktor / Unsplash

Proofs - this is not clickbait

When you open the "Introducing GNOME 47" page on GNOME official website (Wayback Machine) you will see this image at the top:

Introducing GNOME 47

All is well, let's check the image metadata with curl and grep:

$ curl --output - https://foundation.gnome.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2024/09/47-news-banner-1536x240.webp | grep -a -i adobe

<x:xmpmeta xmlns:x="adobe:ns:meta/" x:xmptk="Adobe XMP Core 9.1-c002 1.000000, 0000/00/00-00:00:00">
xmlns:xmp="http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/"
xmlns:xmpGImg="http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/g/img/"
<xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Illustrator 28.7 (Windows)</xmp:CreatorTool>

What the heck? Is this a joke? Or a coincidence? Had to wash my eyes twice, but it is what it is - Adobe Illustrator 28.7 (Windows). Yes, one of the open source flagship projects use proprietary software on Windows to edit images. As you can see, there's nothing super complex on this photo - no need of outstanding filters, AI paintings or tricky gradients.

Right now, some people will be thinking "just one picture, let's forgive and forget" - buckle up and get ready, it's just the beginning. On the same page you'll find the Apple favicon:

Apple favicon

Time to check it too:

$ curl --output - https://foundation.gnome.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2020/08/cropped-icon-180x180.jpg | grep -a -i photoshop

Photoshop 3.08

Wow! It seems that GNOME has been using Adobe products for a long time, because Photoshop 3.0 was released in 1994!

Another page - GNOME Foundation Opens Search for New Executive Director (Wayback Machine):

$ curl --output - https://foundation.gnome.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2024/09/2024-GNOME-EDopening-newsbanner-1536x256.webp | grep -a -i adobe

<stEvt:softwareAgent>Adobe Illustrator 28.7 (Windows)</stEvt:softwareAgent>
<pdf:Producer>Adobe PDF library 17.00</pdf:Producer>

Search for New Executive Director

More GNOME pages with content created using proprietary Adobe software:

Same story with GTK (ex GIMP Toolkit), the free software cross-platform widget toolkit: let's navigate to the Features (Wayback Machine) page and check the photos:

All images above have the metadata 'Software Adobe ImageReady'. Finally something new, because Adobe Lightroom is getting boring. Remember, we are still talking about the top FOSS project website! As you can see, all of these images aren't super complex and definitely not works of art, so they can be created using GIMP or Krita. As you can see, GNOME doesn't care too much about open source or the GNU philosophy, they just want to get the job done fast, no matter what. Photoshop, Lightroom on Windows or MacOS is fine.

Adobe and Linux - coexisting in total ignorance

Now Adobe has strong competitors - Figma and Canva, which has cloud applications and native (Electron) applications for Linux. A decade or two ago, the situation was radically different - Adobe software had a monopoly in the design, illustration and photo editing industry. Photoshop was often used for web development: website mockups were mostly in PSD format. So Linux users were often forced to work with Adobe products. Wine ("Wine is not an emulator") provided limited support for CS6, but not all options worked well, and Adobe software often crashed and the installed didn't work under Wine - Linux users had to run it in a virtual machine first. Another option is to run Photoshop or Illustrator in a virtual machine 24/7, but it's power hungry and far from convenient for working on a laptop.

Many people tried to change this situation - they wrote a LOT of messages on Adobe forums, but they were completely ignored. Not only Adobe forums, probably any popular public platform like Reddit or HN has many messages "How to run Photoshop on Linux". For Adobe it's probably all about money: small market share means small chances to make money and you can ask them forever without any results.

After this decades of ignorance, choosing Adobe software from major Linux project called GNOME is a total mess, losing ground and all pride along with dignity.

Yes, GIMP is. GTK, the main building block of GNOME, was originally called "GIMP ToolKit" in the late 90s. Many people said that GIMP had a bad user experience and was not easy to work with, but hey - what super extra features do you need to create project updates or event announcements? GIMP is more than capable of doing that. Hard to work with complex interface - fine, check PhotoGIMP - this addon will make GIMP more friendly for Photoshop users.

If this is so hard for GNOME team, then who will not choose an alternative? There is Krita, another open source raster graphics editor with simpler interface and more user friendly.

Instead of final note

The official GNOME website says "Our software has no restrictions on use and respects your privacy". But does GNOME respect its users, Free Software, GNU and thousands of Open Source contributors when it uses proprietary software for image editing?! Remember - GNOME still accepts [donations] (https://www.gnome.org/donate/). Can some of those donations go to people who have used Photoshop to create media for GNOME web sites? It's a bit ironic, of course, but not impossible. If your open source product can edit images, but you use another proprietary product that also requires a proprietary operating system to run, what signals are you sending to your users? "An independent computing platform for everyone"? Really?

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