First Post: Open Source Software and the Sacrifices made by People

 Recently, I have spent a good deal of time developing a workflow for Photomicrography.  In temperament I may be a perfectionist; this part is easy, but results pose a challenge.

This first post is inspired by evidence I have seen of the work done behind the scenes by the developers of the remarkable free software package RawTherapee, a raw image processing software for digital photography. I was particularly struck by a thread in which some obviously regular participants in one of the threads about recent cutting edge improvements.  The contributor of one of the improvements, either for white balance; or catching up with modern exif libraries---RawTherapee has not had access to exif data for my camera, a Canon EOS M50, until a certain recent development release; or a recent testing release for noise reduction tweaks.  This developer was thanked by the others, for work that obviously required considerable skill and sweat.  

As it turned out this developer stated he is not able to get outdoors much, due to health concerns.  And programming is a passion for him.

 How many stories of this kind are out there?   I am grateful to these developers.  I cannot understand why others would cop out, take the easy way out, and agree to pay the Micro$oft and/or Apple taxes---incredibly high prices, and even subscriptions (! Egad !  ... ) when software is available, open source software, that was written as a labor of love.  

 RawTherapee is wonderful.  Like other Free Software I have used there has been a learning curve, and sometimes inconveniences---like unavailability of exif data---but in most cases the polish is surprising, but more to the point, these are functionally amazing tools.  

  https://appimage.github.io/RawTherapee/

RawTherapee source