The word “free” is ironically very limiting. It speaks to a price and not quality. “Free” is cute but meh or sometimes even a passing curiosity. It often results in the idea of throwaway software.
I don’t believe anyone in this community would say this of Vital.
This may be tongue-in-cheek but I propose that a new term is defined to talk about professional grade, but free software.
My response to using Vital for the first time was daaaaeeem. The open source approach also drew my thoughts to the notion of “freedom”.
Maybe the term “free…daaeeem” makes more sense - essentially Freedamn! Software.
Open to ideas or thoughts - but I somehow feel this is important get right when we talk about good things.
I totally agree, but I think that free being associated with quality is just something we need to get over. There is so much free software out there that can do so much, “free” no longer has anything to do with quality.
I could go into a whole discussion about how similar this and gender/sex/sexuality are similar in relating unrelated things, but…
I’ll keep things on topic.
Just saying, there are a lot of things that are linked in our minds that we really need to unlink. If you just look, you’ll find so many.
agree with Silas above. However it is Matt’s name that attaches the indicator of quality to the product, much like Uhe and Papen IMO.
No need to introduce another pronoun to confuse things. Keep it simple. Other wise everyone will be pumping out Freedamn self labelled products (regardless of quality) and you are back to square one.
Ultimately, I think things are moving in the other direction – “free” is losing its stigma. The massive success of Blender in the game dev and VFX world has basically demolished any preconceptions people in those industries might have had about free and open-source software. Blender isn’t “a free alternative” anymore; it’s one of the top-tier packages alongside software that costs thousands upfront; it just happens to have a different business model.
Vital is not all that different. It’s professional software with a different business model. I hope it becomes as popular as Blender!