you must be fun at parties

you can't know that

I think that entire comment is actually incorrect. My understanding is that they did not "remove" any maintainers, but actually rejected patches from Russian citizens (because of their employer), and also removed some Russian names from the maintainers list who already have code in the kernel.

yikes.

That doesn't invalidate my statement though.

freedom TO vs freedom FROM

I was more referring to mainline specifically, otherwise your chances of having many people actually benefit from your changes without a lot of effort is small IMO.

I still don't think something so important should be beholden to the whims of one company (Linux Foundation) or their country's laws (USA).

I would strongly prefer to use an operating system that didn't have this problem. Do any even exist?

go against their spirit

I think this is more of a failure of the license itself. It's not a good look to allow something explicitly and then go "no not like that!"

For professionals used to Photoshop, yes it is that bad. People want what's familiar because they're used to it and they're busy or lazy. They don't want to learn something new.

If GIMP wanted to increase their userbase by a million overnight, they would make it look more like Photoshop.

The problem is they and many current users are huge FOSS zealots and see this kind of thing akin to selling your soul to the devil.