I don't think it's really fair to say the FOSS community shys away from things which are hard to implement. I'd cite the Linux kernel as a pretty good example. As for "pretty graphics stuff" not turning on FOSS developers, have you seen Compiz Fusion in action?
If you think that the FOSS community doesn't think graphics and multimedia are important, have you used any of the following projects?
Inkscape
Blender
Ardour
Audacity
Ubuntu Studio is an entire GNU/Linux Distribution dedicated to multimedia creation. Even VLC media player is pretty impressive in terms of codec support.
Take a look at the Elephants Dream if you doubt the capabilities of FOSS multimedia. It was created using Blender.
As far as I'm concerned the real problem is not the lack of FOSS multimedia software, but the lack of proliferation of certain open standards on the web. Just because certain proprietary standards got their first, doesn't mean that they're the best solution and doesn't mean they will win out in the long run. Hopefully the Open Document Format will eventually leave a legacy to prove this. HTML certainly isn't doing badly.
FOSS isn't good at multimedia?
I don't think it's really fair to say the FOSS community shys away from things which are hard to implement. I'd cite the Linux kernel as a pretty good example. As for "pretty graphics stuff" not turning on FOSS developers, have you seen Compiz Fusion in action?
If you think that the FOSS community doesn't think graphics and multimedia are important, have you used any of the following projects?
Ubuntu Studio is an entire GNU/Linux Distribution dedicated to multimedia creation. Even VLC media player is pretty impressive in terms of codec support.
Take a look at the Elephants Dream if you doubt the capabilities of FOSS multimedia. It was created using Blender.
As far as I'm concerned the real problem is not the lack of FOSS multimedia software, but the lack of proliferation of certain open standards on the web. Just because certain proprietary standards got their first, doesn't mean that they're the best solution and doesn't mean they will win out in the long run. Hopefully the Open Document Format will eventually leave a legacy to prove this. HTML certainly isn't doing badly.