The reason for this is that those kinds of software require lots of money to pay developers to work on them full time, because they aren't straightforward applications of the sort of thing you'd get in an engineering/computer science education.
Recent years have suggested that "software as a service" is the only way to get this money due to rampant piracy. If the free software community doesn't like this state of affairs, they need to step up their game.
Completely agree. Although the open source movement has plenty of great engineers and is great at solving complex software problems, it doesn't tend to have everything else that great software companies have.
UI designers, customer researchers, graphics artists, strategy teams (to set an overall vision) e.t.c. tend to be under-represented compared to other software companies.
I also think that open source software tends to be less innovative, as 'design by committee' isn't something that is followed inside for-profit companies with closed software.
Free (as in freedom) software developers often write software that serves some purpose for themselves. That is, there are any number of people writing GPL software for...software development and similar things.
Consider the grandparent post again:
> If the last several decades have shown us anything, it's that the free software movement is excellent at creating some kinds of software (operating systems, development tolls, severs) and generally pretty bad at many other kinds of software (games, content creation software, etc).
This seems to suggest that, if the last several decades have shown us anything, free (as in freedom) software developers are more likely to be willing to write software used for software development, and not very likely to write high quality games or content creation software like Photoshop.
It's well known that those in the free software community are often not paid very well, if at all. Consider the problems OpenSSL has had getting funding, despite millions of people all over the world using it every day.
The people who _are_ writing Photoshop are very much in it for the money, and are taking every step they can to ensure a steady income stream. Look at how Adobe is now trying to rent people Photoshop instead of giving them their own copy.
Recent years have suggested that "software as a service" is the only way to get this money due to rampant piracy. If the free software community doesn't like this state of affairs, they need to step up their game.