Is it?I want to hear your thoughts.

In my experience the open source community has a general philosophy based on knowledge sharing which is done with tolerance and respect of others, now, for me, a dummy with no money that's a wonderful gift - which I'm truly grateful of - in Peace RJKD

I love Gimp. How could it be a rip off? It is free! Most programs that you buy, you are charged a fee when you call for help, but not in this community. I am so thankful and grateful to be in this community. All have had patience with me and I have learned a lot.

Given the number of ex-Photoshop users complaining that Gimp doesn't look enough like Photoshop, it's clearly not a ripoff.

Was Gimp inspired by PS? Likely. Was PS inspired by earlier image editors? Likely, too.

Read up on a little GIMP history here.
http://www.gimp.org/about/ancient_history.html

Two men going against the grain of creating a compiler, choose instead an image manipulation tool? Definitely inspired. PS elitists tend to look down upon the humble freeware as they swing from vine to vine, beating their chests wildly and with much unnecessary intimidation. I mean, come on, trashing on GIMP like it's trying to be PhotoShop? Peter and Spencer have always made it abundantly clear that GIMP was not intended to be some kind of PS knock-off. It is, on the other hand ONE VERY VALUABLE and FREE manipulation tool, which you can't say about PS unless you're a software pirate.

You ask, "Is GIMP of Photoshop ..."

GIMP is not of Photoshop, GIMP is of GIMP and has no connection to Photoshop.

Since GIMP is free, how can it be a ripoff? It is a carefully constructed image manipulation program and I'm quite sure no one knows the full scope of it; it just keeps giving and giving and coming up with surprises to every user. It has an astonishing breadth of variety and precision.

Very interesting.

I use Gimp because it is free. Not interested in Photoshop at all.

Check out a 1999 interview with Peter and Spencer.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990417052 ... -gimp.html

Gimp is certainly not a ripoff...perhaps it is inspired by many similar programs, but it seems to have the best all-around options by being open source which allows anyone to create filters and such to do what so many other programs can do...including photoshop. I love using it, and one of the reasons is because of this great forum.

Hi all,
It's been quite a while since I was on this forum.
The reason is I don't use Gimp anymore due to bad eyesight.
Every now and then I visit GC.

Apparently the OP isn't familiar with free software.
Gimp can be run on Windows,Apple and Linux.
It runs best on Linux!
Photoshop is written for Windows.
Linux is also free.
It was written by Linus Thorvalds a Finnish university student.
He wanted to be able to run Unix on his Intel-386 computer at home.
Unix didn't sell a 386 version and he didn't have the money anyway.
There have been lawsuits by Unix but they lost.
He published the result on the internet for free.

That's in a nutshell how free software came about.
Gerard.

To further elaborate on previous points, I think you need to understand the free and open source movement. I'd suggest watching Revolution OS if you want to see an excellent documentary explaining its history.

I use gimp because it's free and I have no money.