That’s an interesting perspective. Did GIMP get there first but just not patent the tech or it just makes it so that GIMP cannot replicate improvements?

Adobe Photoshop was originally written for the Apple Macintosh pre-OSX in the late 1980s, pre-dating GIMP massively. Large numbers of software patents soon followed. trivia- Microsoft Word was also written natively for the Mac OS -- it was many, many years before a graphical Microsoft version was available.