On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 1:19 AM, drew Roberts wrote: Well, I already blogged recently about that regarding graphics tools. Let me provide you a really short summary. 1. A commercial company is about revenue. Canonical does the most successful Linux distribution and still doesn't have revenue per se. What business model would justify spending several millions of dollars a year to work on an NLE fulltime? 2. Integrating into existing open source projects is often difficult. Yes, e.g. Blender was started by Ton who's worked for himself all his life, isn't easily scared by paperwork, knows how to negotiate etc. But most existing projects are run by people who work on them in their spare time. And negotiating with them can be complicated. For instance, two of the major graphics apps teams, GIMP's and Inkscape's, have very diverse views on paid development. If you really look closer at aforementioned Canonical, you might discover that they actually hired several graphics apps developers. Three of Canonical employees were Inkscape developers, and another one was the guy who started Simple Scan (scanning app for GNOME). All four were eventually sucked into fixing stuff and solving infrastracture issues. None of them actually works on their initial projects anymore. They take care about things that bring direct revenue. Yes, there are cases such as GNOME Color Manager and colord where principle developer employed by Red Hat is actually paid by the company to work on that (not initially, only since recently), because Red Hat has two major animation studios as clients, but, again, this is the case where infrastructure had to be fixed (and I mean _really_ fixed). The guy doesn't work on production software per se, becuase production software is not part of existing pipelines at those studios. So we are back to square one. Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org