successful games are based on open source code?
Urban Terror is a perfect port of Quake to Linux, while
Heroes of Newerth is one of the most (if not THE most) succesful Dota-like game and it has been ported to Linux. There are thousands of other games ranging from RPG, FPS, RTS, puzzles, ... They might not be as pretty looking than the ones under Windows, but you cannot say that open source games are inexistant.
How many graphic designers use GIMP?
Here's a forum with over 5000 users.
Here's another one with over 22 000 users.
I could spend more time showing you how big the GIMP community is. If
you don't know any designer using GIMP don't go and dismiss the work of thousands and thousands of daily users. Gimp can virtually do anything Photoshop can. It might not do it as well, or as easily I admit, but it is definitely worthy of any commercial product. don't dismiss it simply because it's free.
How many animators use open source alternatives?
Big Buck Bunny has been made entirely with Blender, a 100% open source 3D app.
But more importantly, animation, games, architecture, photo design, ... those are niches. What a (mainstream) computer is universally supposed to do is web browsing, multimedia, document handling and office work,
data backup,
information sharing, heavy calculations, cryptography and security, ... In these fields (which are much more common than the use of AutoCAD) open source software and algorithms have proven not only to provide a viable alternative, but often even surpassing their closed-source counterparts.
My point is simply that
YES! open source could , and should, be considered an alternative when proprietary software is too expensive. And the reason why I get so vocal about this issue is because I have a strong belief that this could be a solution for the huge piracy problems in Lebanon.
How many people can afford a 300$+ license for Windows? Not to mention 100$+ for Office. How many businesses can afford the business license for 20 PCs? What about MS SQL? IIS server ? other M$ product? How many businesses can afford an Oracle DB? Sure some of them can, but entrepreneurs and freelancers could cut costs hugely by learning open source products (instead of illegaly getting them for free).
Open source comes from an academic tradition of passing knowledge. It has grown almost entirely in Universities. But in countries like Lebanon (or other African/Asian/poorer countries) it can prove to be a commercial solution with incredibly high potential.
