> it is still more robust than software created by multi-billion dollar corporations
OSS software has few to no profit incentives. It it written to do something, not to sell something. It also has little time pressure. If a release slips, there is no impact to quarterly numbers. Commercial software is not an engineering effort, it is a marketing exercise.
When Komatsu decided to go after Catapiliers market, the set quality as their first strategic intent. They then made sure that later strategic steps were beholden to that earlier one.
XP/Agile manafesto emphasized 'working software' which in theory was to have a similar intent.
But the problem with manafestos is that people package them and sell them.
Agile manafesto signatories like Jeff Sutherland selling books with titles promising twice the code in half the time don't help.
OSS has a built in incentive to maintain quality, at least for smaller projects.
Companies could, but unfortunately management practices that make people quite successful becoming habits that are hard to change even when they want to.
Hopefully these big public incidents start to make the choice to care about quality and easier sell.
The point being is that quality is still an important thing for profit oriented companies, but it is easy to drop it and only notice it after it is too late.
Showing that it aligns with long term goals is possible, but getting people to do so is harder.
I disagree. OSS is only ahead if there is no money in it, like new programming languages. Whenever it is profitable, OSS projects just cannot compete with professionals working full time.
OSS is usually reinventing the wheel free from commercial pressures (Linux, GNU, Apache). Or they are previous commercial products (Firefox, LibreOffice, Kubernetes, Bazel).
You're comparing household name with household name. Commercial software has a marketing budget, but free software spreads more by word-of-mouth (or association with a big and processional organisation like GNU), so that's an apples-to-oranges comparison. GIMP isn't very good, as free software image editors go: Script-Fu, plugins, or UI familiarity are basically the only reasons to choose it these days.
I'm curious as to which ones they do not have compared to Adobe products.
The only one I can think of is proper material layer painting in Blender, you can get there with addons but haven't found one that's as good. Genuinely the only thing that I miss, and I do this full time.
Darktable has some features that RawTherapee doesn't, and vice versa. I imagine that some of that stuff isn't in the Adobe software. (I've heard that recent versions of Lightroom have removed local file management support, which both these programs still have – though don't quote me on that.)
OSS software has few to no profit incentives. It it written to do something, not to sell something. It also has little time pressure. If a release slips, there is no impact to quarterly numbers. Commercial software is not an engineering effort, it is a marketing exercise.