I love Lightroom so much so that I am a 'small e' evangelist for Lightroom and hate Photoshop but like driving a car, I guess I'm going to get over my loathing of Photoshop's horrendous user interface and non digital photographer oriented features and eventually buy CS3. I am still hoping that Lightroom team eventually re-imagines Photoshop! And yes, I share Tim's ambivalence about Lightroom's non open sourced nature. I think that all apps like all mainstream operating systems will eventually be built around an open source core like Mac OS X is built around BSD and how Lightroom is built around Lua and sqlite.

FROM ongoing · Lightroom and Open Source:

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Over the last few years, I’ve become something of an open-source triumphalist, drifting to the conclusion that (on the engineering side) it’s the best way to build software and (on the business side) it’s a better way to monetize it. I have to confess that Adobe Lightroom has kind of shaken my convictions. Certain elements of its UI and design (for example, the crop/rotate tool, and the nondestructive editing paradigm) are qualitative steps forward in the state of the art. Furthermore, I can’t think of a single good business reason for Adobe to open-source it. I guess the conclusion is obvious: for the foreseeable future, both models of software building and marketing are going to march along; neither is doomed.

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