Doesn’t sound like you’re overly familiar with open source software, but the idea should give you some solace. It’s community-created and -supported software, often one programmer’s labor of love that caught on and developed a following of contributing programmers and interested users. Users’ groups are alive and well, and they can be picky, picky, picky. Sometimes the original programmer drops out and the software lives on. That world still exists, an explicit challenge to the closed and locked world of commercial software.

Image processing is thriving, and the advent of UNIX/Linux deserves a lot of credit. The associated culture of openness has lead to several free packages becoming standards, notably GIMP for general work, and ISIS for scientific image processing. There you’ll find the vast libraries of user-contributed functions–every algorithm ever conceived by the mind of man is available somewhere for free via open source (and yeah, that actually does include some algorithms allegedly protected by patents that nevertheless have been implemented by rebels and marked “download at your own risk”).