I have mixed emotions on this. On the one hand, Adobe's poor security has hurt _millions_ of their users. On the other hand, Adobe has invested many millions of dollars into the development of Photoshop, and thousands of people rely on it for their livelihoods. Their image processing algorithms are top-notch, and until now, were essentially unavailable to competitors. If source for photoshop-specific killer features is leaked, the damage to Adobe could be irreparable, which is sad, because they really are quite an innovative company and I'd hate to see them disappear.
There's nothing in photoshop that is particularly "secret saucey". Any competitor could fairly easily implement any single Photoshop feature based on their own research and/or reading siggraph papers. The value of Photoshop is in the entire package and also in the easy integration of it into all of Adobe's other tools. A competitor getting access to the code couldn't really benefit from that in a way they could legally get away with (it would be really obvious if they just dropped massive chunks of the Adobe code into their own product).
While this is an unfortunate situation for Adobe, I doubt it changes anything for them in terms of Photoshop sales now or in the future.
Photoshop has become too big , too unstable while adding features that make little sense. I'm still on CS3 ( i do photo editing for web and studios ). There is no reason for me to upgrade.
There is unfortunatly no room for real competition. All the print/photo industry is locked in proprietary file formats (psd,pdf,...) all owned by Adobe. And piracy is actually hurting small shops, not Adobe.
As we move into the cloud there may be room for more focused Saas apps(like a web version of Lightroom or Fireworks), though i'm afraid Javascript/HTML5 will not deliver the required performances(unless JS becomes as fast as C).
The latest versions of Photoshop do have a lot of new tools used by a lot of people. It is much like any other high-end program - 90% of the people use 10% of the product, it just that all use a different 10%.
> All the print/photo industry is locked in proprietary file formats (psd,pdf,...)
PDF is actually an ISO standard (32000-1:2008) and Adobe has granted a royalty free license to use all Adobe patents to implement the standard. They have also said that all future versions will be defined by the ISO committee.
PSD is proprietary but documented and implemented by a number of programs.
Wouldn't leaking the source code for photoshop increase what photo manipulation software will be able to do in the future? I think if the competition had Adobe's photo imaging software, this would force the envelope to be pushed.
