Thus spoke John Culleton

Understood. The reference to Gimp 2.0 and CMYK is the closest thing to a commitment to incorporate useful CMYK capability in Gimp that I have come across. There are two markets, on-line stuff and printed stuff. Without CMYK Gimp is limited to the first and effectively locked out of the second. Hence it cannot be considered as a complete

Depends on your point of view. I've done several covers for Linux Journal using nothing but GIMP without CMYK. LJ took my uncompressed TIFF submission and let their printer handle CMYK issues. I've done similar things for CD covers and other prints. I did the cover to my first book with GIMP.

Many smaller print houses have been eager to work with me on issues like this - essentially I'm handing off the CMYK work to them.

So you aren't "effectively" shut out of the print market. It just depends on how precise you need to be. In my case, none of the prints I've done have been significantly altered by the printers doing the CMYK work for me.

Photoshop replacement no matter how many marvelous tricks it will do.=20

Again, depends on what you're working on.

CMYK is the one bold move that would make all the difference in publishing.=20

But this I have to agree with. GIMP does need CMYK support for wider acceptance. One can always argue if "wider acceptance" is necessary. Depends on the established goal, I suppose.

I hope for a world where the non-conformist can do whatever he/she needs to do with free software. The only non-free program I use regularly is called Mup, a music notation program I paid $29.00 for many years ago. TeX means never having to buy InDesign or Quark for typesetting. Gimp should mean never having to buy PhotoShop for book covers. Until that happy day I will struggle along with Gimp + pnmtotiffcmyk.

Mostly true. But I went through this with book publishers too way before OpenOffice and AbiWord were as stable as they are now. I got them to work with RTF and Applix (which isn't open source, but was available for Linux at the time). I just had to explain my position and need to use the products I was writing about. The same can be said for GIMP and printers. You just have to work a little harder to get things done with those who do not use your tools.