> discontinued: Atom just got discontinued. It's open source. Photoshop on the other hand has withstood the test of time. Photoshop has not withstood the test

> discontinued: Atom just got discontinued. It's open source. Photoshop on the other hand has withstood the test of time. Photoshop has not withstood the test of time for me. I did a lot of Photoshop a few decades ago. I can't afford > $1000 per year for a hobby. My old Photoshop files are dead, for all intents and purposes. I do occasionally use decades-old, unmaintained open-source tools to open old files. > Audacity's 3.0 update removed a feature I relied on. I wasn't forced to update to it, sure, but proprietary software doesn't force updates either. Yes, it does. Cloud-based, you have no choice. Installed, increasingly, you have no choice either, since activation servers get taken down. > Being able to fix your own bugs is a great part of open source! But not something most professional software developers really expect to do for their IDE. It's a check-and-balance. I fix issues maybe in 0.0001% of the tools I use, but when I do, it's really important. With proprietary, you can work 70 hours per week for five years, and invest your blood and soul into a project, and be left hanging at the end, because you're reliant on someone else. With open-source, you bite the bullet, fix it yourself, and keep chugging along. > you'll never have a guarantee that a tool you invest time in or money in will be the leading tool in five years. My experience is that "leading tool" is way oversold. The difference between JQuery a decade ago and React today is important, but even a huge difference like that won't make-or-break a business or a project. Technology is easy. If I needed to write my stuff in FORTRAN, I'd be less productive, but in the end, I'd learn FORTRAN and get the job done. It's not a reason I'd pick proprietary over open-source. What is important is all the other stuff. If you've bought something from Oracle or Google -- who are famous for this -- and they discontinue your product or ramp up licensing costings 100x once you've built your infrastructure around them, that CAN and WILL break a business (or a personal project). Startups have a short half-life. Big businesses have a longer one ("No one got fired for buying IBM"). Open-source is eternal. Legacy is important. If you don't believe me, have a look at all the FORTRAN and COBOL code still running on old mainframes. If you don't take long-term into account, you're unlikely to do anything lasting.