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).

Can you explain why apple, google and microsoft all use a fork of a browser made by KDE?

They use a fork of a browser engine and there is no money in building a browser engine.

The money is in building a browser around the engine because there you can inject tracking and try to make your product unique.

>Whenever it is profitable, OSS projects just cannot compete with professionals working full time.

Windows is profitable, but Linux is competing well on servers.

> OSS projects just cannot compete with professionals working full time.

Many OSS projects have professionals working full time on them.

Not when it comes to video/image/vector editing. DaVinci Resolve, Adobe and Affinity are still miles ahead of FOSS creativity tools like The GIMP.

Try Krita, Darktable, Scribus and Blender.

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.

Is there any feature in Krita, Darktable, Scribus, or Blender, which Adobe products do not have? It certainly is the case the other way round.

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.)

Krita has a lot that Photoshop doesn't: https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/introduction_from_othe... .

You obviously haven’t compared GUIs, the most hodgepodge mix of we have that feature! in a sea of confusion and disrespect for interface standards.