“A critical point for Adobe developers arrived a few years back
during the Web boom period. The company had to choose whether to
continue developing Photoshop as an all-in-one graphic tool
supporting both publishing and Web development, or create a
separate Web graphics editor for Web graphic creation. It chose to
spin off ImageReady for Web development and GIF animation and keep
Photoshop for desktop publishing. Now the GIMP, the open source
answer to Photoshop, faces the same decision.“Now is the time to consider splitting up the program. Today the
GIMP needs a new graphical user interface that is compatible with
current standards, while at the same time the open source community
needs a separate tool for publishing and Web design…”