Isn't the main problem for OSS adoption advertising?
You can't advertise without doing some marketing work. Free Software projects have to figure out who their target markets are and cater to them. GIMP is the best example because it could be split into a few different versions; one that's suitable for Photo Shop users, and another that's useful for people who haven't been "tainted" by Photo Shop.
There could be tutorials and books that make it easier for Photo Shop users to use GIMP.
If there was some cash, you could do the sleazy thing and pay people to use the GIMP when teaching graphic design classes or whatever. Heck, you may not have to pay them at all if you can convince them that the price of $0 makes the GIMP better than Photo Shop.
The trick, it would seem, is convincing them that a $0 tool with its faults and crashes is better than a stable $400 industry-standard tool 15 years in the development and that, when billing design time at $80-120/hour, the latter tool won't quickly prove its worth.
Time and time again, Gimp has proven to me that it's not the tool for doing anything but the most basic editing. I want to love it, because it's free, but I don't have the time to waste when it eats my drawings.
What could really help would be a gallery of stunning art created with only open-source tools; the trick there is teaching the artists to use the tools and making it worth their time to do so...
You can't advertise without doing some marketing work. Free Software projects have to figure out who their target markets are and cater to them. GIMP is the best example because it could be split into a few different versions; one that's suitable for Photo Shop users, and another that's useful for people who haven't been "tainted" by Photo Shop.
There could be tutorials and books that make it easier for Photo Shop users to use GIMP.
If there was some cash, you could do the sleazy thing and pay people to use the GIMP when teaching graphic design classes or whatever. Heck, you may not have to pay them at all if you can convince them that the price of $0 makes the GIMP better than Photo Shop.