38 ms·

Photoshop license costs $348 a year. If 1000 people get together and put $400 each, you'll get $400000. That money could be used to leverage a Gimp to be more P

• bb88 9y ago
  I think the photoshop vs gimp is a bad comparison, mostly because throwing money at gimp to make it better is a bad idea. It would be better to start from scratch. Now if you wanted to throw $400 for a photoshop like system to start from the ground up and work across all three platforms, I think you've got a great idea. You'd avoid the cruft, you could do subscription/pay-per-use cloud based filters, you could start with 32bits per channel from the start, instead of the slow transition to GEGL...
  • formula1 9y ago
    Why would spending money on a brand new system with no proof of success be better than a matured application with plugin support?
    • callumlocke 9y ago
      Because GIMP has a lot of baggage: a very particular UI, a community of active users (many of whom probably like it exactly how it is thanks), and a terrible name.
      • robotresearcher 9y ago
        So fork it. New name, new UI. Seashore was a try at this a decade ago. http://seashore.sourceforge.net/The_Seashore_Project/Screenshots.html http://seashore.sourceforge.net/The_Seashore_Project/Screens...
        • grogenaut 9y ago
          I think the gp's point is they'd rather rewrite than fork. If you fork you lose the other devs esp as you diverge greatly. But you get all the baggage. A lot of coders doing side projects do it for fun and to learn and that often means making their own architecture decisions (and mistakes) so they can practice that process and learn
          • robotresearcher 9y ago
            Sure. I was responding to the suggestion that the key problems with GIMP are the UI and name. The image manipulation code is surely pretty mature by now.
        • deleted 9y ago
          [deleted]
      • jessaustin 9y ago
        The name was "terrible" right after the film "Pulp Fiction" was released. Decades later, is that still true?
        • slantyyz 9y ago
          That word existed well before Pulp Fiction. From Dictionary.com: >> Usually Disparaging and Offensive. a term used to refer to a person who limps or is lame. >> Origin >> An Americanism dating back to 1920-25; origin uncertain >> Usage note >> When describing someone who is lame, gimp is used with disparaging intent and perceived as insulting. But within the disability community, it is sometimes a term of self-reference.
        • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
          Yes. "Gimp" in UK English is not a word you say in polite company, like calling your software "slut". Sure, it's fine to speak of with a close friend but difficult to even mention to people in certain circles. I don't know what's wrong with calling it "The [GNU] Imp", an imp being like a fairy/pixy (but with a sense of mischief too), like Puck. The mascot could be kept as it fits the description imp as well as it fits anything (I've no idea after c.20 years what it's supposed to be, though I recall looking it up once). Maybe "Imp" is offensive in other languages? (Nothing other than alternate English meanings shows on Wiktionary).
      • zanny 9y ago
        This GIT thing is never going to take off because it has a lot of baggage: a very particular CLI and grammar, a community of active users (many of whom probably like it exactly how it is), and a "terrible" name.
    • epicide 9y ago
      You could ask the same question comparing your project with Photoshop.
  • scandox 9y ago
    What's wrong with GIMP? I use it every day and find it pretty good. On the MAC now it has lots of weird glitches but they seem pretty fixable...
    • dsego 9y ago
      There was nothing wrong with Windows 95.
    • crispyambulance 9y ago
      GIMP is perfectly fine (for many use-cases), but its not what you or I think that matters. Perhaps the best person to ask is a photoshop user who actually paid for it?
      • rgbrenner 9y ago
        I pay for creative suite. GIMP is very far behind. There are many significant core features missing, and many tools missing that make it difficult and time consuming to use. It would be more accurate to call it 'advanced paint' than photoshop. CS is expensive and I use a small part of its features... if GIMP covered just 25% of what photoshop could do, I would use it. But I think the only people who think GIMP is close to replacing it are those that have never used/learned photoshop.
        • tomc1985 9y ago
          Do you really use GIMP? Because I don't think you use it very much if you think that it is a quarter of Photoshop. Adobe regularly copies features from the GIMP, like content-aware fill
          • rgbrenner 9y ago
            I'm well aware of the status of GIMP. I first used it 15+ years ago. I used it for many years before buying PS. I last used it maybe 6 months ago. I like to check it out occasionally when my CS subscription is up for renewal. I actually pay, not just for CS, but an entire Windows computer to run it. The rest of my computers run Linux, and I use open source software everywhere. I would absolutely love to switch to GIMP, if it were at all possible.
• danbruc 9y ago
  The time that went into Photoshop cost a lot more than $400k, I would guess between two and three orders of magnitude more. Even given that you would not have to start from scratch and that you know your target pretty much exactly and don't have to go through almost 30 years of evolution, $400k would not get you nearly close enough to Photoshop to make switching worthwhile. Also assuming starting with GIMP is a good idea in the first place, I know almost nothing about its features, architecture and code base.
  • zjaffee 9y ago
    While it would almost certainly cost more than 400k to build a replacement photoshop, the open source community would already be profiting off the fact that a commercial photoshop already exists, and has years of product professionals spending large amounts of resources to understand and cater towards their users.
    • masukomi 9y ago
      and if you're building on Gimp you're WAY past "from scratch". The bulk of it is already there. Mostly Gimp just needs usability / human interaction changes.
      • ssalazar 9y ago
        > and if you're building on Gimp you're WAY past "from scratch". The bulk of it is already there. This could be a good thing or a bad thing if major changes are needed. A project of GIMP's size is a big ship to steer.
        • zanny 9y ago
          There is a neat feature of large fundraiser campaigns in free software you can take advantage of, in that if you do get 400k and hire 5 devs and have them work a year on a wide range of features for some software, it doesn't really matter what upstream says if the users want those features. You just fork if upstream isn't "on board", work on your own separate branch for a year, and then when all the users start downloading and using the fork the upstream will have to work with you to merge all the work done since 8000 hours of work on their project is not something they can discard. As long as you wrote useful features then GIMP, for example, wouldn't be able to argue semantics on the patch set and tie up merging for a long time on politics. Their users would demand the features.
• k__ 9y ago
  Paying $400, even once a year for 10 years for something that works is probably cheaper in the long run than paying $400 once with a high likelihood that you get a bunch of garbage for the next 10 years.
• bpicolo 9y ago
  Photoshop has a lot of engineering/product work going into making it better. Unless the price of it were totally absurd, it's always going to be a worthwhile expense if it's the most efficient piece of software to use, because software is typically much cheaper than labor. "Good enough" isn't the goal in this regard. In this case, Photoshop will continue to dominate (unless they get lazy/give up) because they have recurring cash to reinvest.
  • sanbor 9y ago
    Probably many people would be happy just using an open source version of Photoshopp 6 an they would be ok missing some of the features released in the last 10 years (like painting 3D surfaces or automatically fill a region of the picture that you delete). Sometimes companies forcing you to update your software to get your money it's not a good thing (Windows 10?). With open source there is always the chance of forking as what happened with OpenOffice and LibreOffice. The issue of having to pay to get access to your tool it's a big issue. For big companies having to pay for 100 workstations yearly the monetary incentive is big. Once many people is aware that in the long term it's a better deal to put their money into software libre projects, maybe different companies could compite to get your money.
    • keenerd 9y ago
      > they would be ok missing some of the features released in the last 10 years (like painting 3D surfaces or automatically fill a region of the picture that you delete) Content aware fill was in Gimp before Photoshop. It was an open-source PhD project.
    • wolco 9y ago
      Photoshop version 2 was given away for free on the adobe site a year or so ago. It works great and does most things fine.
• danvoell 9y ago
  Kickstarter?
  • s73ver 9y ago
    Kickstarter or Patreon would seem to be the kind of thing made for this problem. Maybe those that donate more get their pet issue moved up the queue.
    • sanbor 9y ago
      What about you pay to get hours of work (HoW). Then people put their HoW into the issues that they want to solve. Example: Having different keymaps scheme support in Gimp would take 100 hours. So once people put enough HoW into that issue the team can start to tackle it.
      • icebraining 9y ago
        https://www.bountysource.com/ https://www.bountysource.com/
      • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        Keymaps being sets of shortcut keys? GIMP used to have that with dynamic update and easily​ shared keymap files.
• Torn 9y ago
  For simple drag + drop design needs, have you tried Canva? https://www.canva.com https://www.canva.com
• resf 9y ago
  Hey if you can find 1000 people to pay $400, I will make it. But it's hard to convince people to hand over their money. SaaS works because the profits are reinvested into marketing.
• antigirl 9y ago
  You should be using adobe xd or sketch for any app/web work, photoshop is best for photo manipulation and raster images. And yes it is needed for stock heavy websites...
• HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
  If you're using Photoshop instead of GIMP, you're probably a business. If you're a business and $348 a year is a big deal to you, you probably aren't going to remain in business for long.
• hgears 9y ago
  FWIW there is the Photography plan which is $120/yr instead-- http://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html http://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html, but point taken.
• chasing 9y ago
  The Photoshop license is $10/mo according to Adobe's site. $120/yr. Also, $400k is, like, nothing in developer time (compared to what Adobe puts into their software, at least).
  • mikegerwitz 9y ago
    You have many hackers already donating their time to work on free software projects, that might be able to do more if they were compensated to do so. $400k is a lot of money to partially compensate people who are already donating much of their time, especially when you consider that you don't have to worry about paying for benefits.
    • dboreham 9y ago
      Pure Fantasy.
      • ethanwillis 9y ago
        And GNU/Linux will never take off.
        • GoToRO 9y ago
          As far as casual user is concerned, it didn't. Large corporations instead enjoy a very nice free ride (all the servers).
          • ReverseCold 9y ago
            Chromebooks are already outselling Macs. A lot of (most, even?) American schools are buying Chromebooks for students to use because they're simple and work well. ChromeOS uses the Linux kernel.
            • jpetso 9y ago
              I'd add that to the list of free rides for large corporations. Students getting Chromebooks aren't sucked into the Linux ecosystem and open source community that encourages you to improve parts of the system yourself. Instead, it leaves system maintenance (and learning experience) entirely to the administrator and really only provides Chrome as the operating system, with all implications. Control your data locally? Why not upload it to Google Drive instead. Learn git commands? Better find that hidden Developer Mode switch, because crosh isn't going to get you very far. Get involved in improving Linux or Chromium? Nah, better edit some JavaScript in a web view with someone else's proprietary online code editor. Google can (and will) swap Linux out of Chromium whenever they want to, because none of the interfaces and none of the community overlap. When Fuchsia gets swapped in, neither you nor the students will notice, and it won't have made a difference other than Linux having helped Google's locked-down, centrally controlled platform to succeed.
• jasonsync 9y ago
  Affinity already has great Photoshop and Illustrator alternatives: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ The opportunity with Photoshop may not be to create another Photoshop clone, or add more features, but rather create smaller, specialized editing apps, that each target a subset of the Photoshop user-base, with perhaps less features. Look at how Adobe Lightroom cherry picked a few Photoshop and Bridge components, to create a more specialized app that does a specialized job that Photoshop might have done in the past. Or how Adobe's iPad Pro apps again deliver just a small subset of the total available features from their parent apps, making them more specialized for specific use-cases. Photoshop's massive fragmented user base is ripe for the pickin' for sure. Could you tear down Gimp like that? Or would it be better to start from scratch?
  • Nullabillity 9y ago
    Where is the source code or even just Linux binaries? Otherwise Affinity isn't really relevant when discussing GIMP.
    • rgbrenner 9y ago
      wasnt the question about replacing Photoshop? Hate to break it to you, but not one person who uses photoshop uses Linux.
      • iaml 9y ago
        >but not one person who uses photoshop uses Linux Not true: I use photoshop (albeit, not professionally) and have a subscription for it, but am writing this from linux. Dualboot exists, you know.
      • H1Supreme 9y ago
        That's absurd.
        • rgbrenner 9y ago
          FYI Photoshop doesn't work on Linux.. so not so much absurd, as factual
• falcolas 9y ago
  I'll be the negative Nancy here - you'll never get 1000 people to pay $400 each for any OSS software, no matter the price of the competitor. The reason is a simple value estimation. It's open source (and so free to get) therefore its price is $0. Any product that is free signals that the product has correspondingly low value. I think it's simply unrealistic to expect people to put forward $400 for something with such low value perception and whose fair market price is $0. This is especially true when Photoshop has such a high value perception (in part because it is better, and in part as a justification for shelling out the $400). Ask yourself this - Have you, or will you, paid (donated, ...) $70 for using Vim (atom, neovim, emacs, VSC, ...) to support development? Have you paid $200 to Debian, Ubuntu, or Redhat for your Linux OS? $5,000 for (open|libre)ssl? $13,000 per core for PostgreSQL/MySQL?
  • jkeat 9y ago
    If I could count on the 999 other people, Kickstarter-style, I just might.
    • grogenaut 9y ago
      Well... Set it up
      • falcolas 9y ago
        He'd also need the GIMP devs to cooperate: to provide tangible feature sets with timelines, part time PR for updating and managing the Kickstarter campaign, and an part time CFO for managing the sudden influx and management of $360,000 (minus Kickstarter and the payment processor's share), dev salaries, taxes, and such. I would be curious if the GIMP dev team could reach usability parity with Photoshop on only that money. It seems a bit on the low side frankly (about a year's time of a good developer and UX designer, plus support staff).
        • masukomi 9y ago
          he could always fork it and pay for other developers if the core team didn't want to participate in this. You'd rather the core team's approval and participation, but you don't NEED it.
• rgbrenner 9y ago
  $400k pays for 3 people.. maybe a couple of more if you hire from a cheaper country. If all GIMP needed was a few more developers to be competitive against PS, that would have happened by now. You're seriously underestimating the amount of work GIMP needs to do.. and/or the amount of work that already goes into GIMP.
  • mikegerwitz 9y ago
    That depends where you are hiring from, even within the US. You're also reaching out to people who may be okay taking a lower salary to work on a project they are already passionate about or already donate their time to. Chris Webber, for example, took less than a $40k salary without benefits to work on MediaGoblin full time for a year: https://mediagoblin.org/news/we-did-it.html https://mediagoblin.org/news/we-did-it.html
    • pjmlp 9y ago
      > You're also reaching out to people who may be okay taking a lower salary to work on a project they are already passionate about or already donate their time to. The games industry gladly takes advantage of this.
      • cookiecaper 9y ago
        Yes. Many people new to the industry don't understand that the glamor of working for a game company almost always translates to bad working conditions and low-ball pay. Games are hard, but there are just so many people who want to be involved in making them, that there is a pretty excessive supply of prospective developers. Game companies take that as a license to burn people out, because they know once that crew finally tires of the beatings, there will be a fresh crop of bright-eyed devs anxious to replace them. CRUD apps may be tedious, but getting a job at a local medium-sized company working on them is usually much more pleasant than working for a game developer.
  • tomc1985 9y ago
    Oh but it is? Do you use the GIMP? Photoshop's content-aware fill first appeared as a third-party open-source plugin for the GIMP. While one certainly can't equate the two I have found GIMP works well for a broad array of digital imagery tasks... just like Photoshop. Much of Photoshop's dominance has to do with the network effects of Adobe's ubiquitous ecosystem as much as the comprehensiveness of their tooling.
• nether 9y ago
  This 4chan thread is pretty illustrative of Gimp's UI shortcomings: http://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/60884056 http://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/60884056
  • masukomi 9y ago
    ugh. thank you for reminding my why i never visit 4chan
  • daveguy 9y ago
    Oh wow. No wonder my mom switched from trying linux back to windows after I tried to tell her "you can just use gimp for basic Photoshop stuff" It doesn't even have a circle tool and the best "solution" seems to be ellipse select with shift -> fill -> shrink selection -> delete What a dystopian ux nightmare. Sorry Mom, for inadvertently inflicting gimp on you.
    • ivm 9y ago
      I loved the reply where they opened Python inside GIMP and draw the circle with "import turtle".
    • e12e 9y ago
      Er, no. The best solution is to use the circle (select) tool, convert the selection to path, then stroke the path. I don't think it's that far from how one goes about drawing bezier paths in PS (although it is a little more convoluted). https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/28344/how-to-make-circle-with-bordered-boundary-using-ellipse-tool https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/28344/how-...
• bluGill 9y ago
  The freebsd foundation gets over a million dollars a year. That isn't enough to beat out Windows or even linux. (I know linux has a foundation as well and I presume has a larger budget, I just don't know the numbers off hand)
  • dandelion_lover 9y ago
    AFAIK, for most tasks GNU/Linux is already good enough. Look for example, at a successful project in Munich to replace Windows for public employees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux. The main problem is people do not want to learn a new interface or have programs running only on Windows.
• SunShiranui 9y ago
  I find Krita to be a more user-friendly program than The Gimp, though it's more painting-oriented: https://krita.org/ https://krita.org/
• austenallred 9y ago
  Crowdfunding open source seems like a good idea in general (in fact I could see a platform built around that specifically), but you may be underestimating the amount of money/effort required to build something comparable to Photoshop. So I like the idea in principle, but not in this particular instance. For what it's worth, I think Sketch is much more user friendly and is $99 one-time. Certainly not OSS, but a better deal than Photoshop for most things, and a much more user-friendly interface than Gimp (though I suppose that's subjective).
  • pavel_lishin 9y ago
    The logistics themselves are already giving me a headache. You have $400k, but are Gimp's developers (and they exist, right?) ready to just get an infusion of somewhere on the order of three years of salary and get to work? I assume the roadmap would change with that amount of funding.
  • Gurrewe 9y ago
    I've seen some cases where patreon.com is used to fund open source projects. Vue.js is founded there for example [1]. 1: https://www.patreon.com/evanyou https://www.patreon.com/evanyou
  • dawnerd 9y ago
    Sketch is 99 dollars a year. After the year you can still use it but you won't get updates. If you work on a team you'll pretty much be forced to always have the latest version. Still, 99/year is a drop in the bucket. Even 50/month for all of creative suite isn't all that much considering many of us will just add it to our business expenses and write it off.
  • ianai 9y ago
    It's probably attainable if those 1000 people manage to confine their feature requests to something 400k can fund.
  • cacarr 9y ago
    No Linux version.
  • 9y ago
• romanovcode 9y ago
  The problem is that as soon as you start paying for something you demand support and OSS often completely lacks this. It even says so in license files.
• eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  companies pay for photoshop licenses, not people, and few hundreds companies can easily put together way more than $400k - if only "cooperation" wasn't such a taboo concept.
• conductr 9y ago
  My question is, what is preventing GIMP from tapping into their existing userbase? I get they are FOSS. But, they could still add in their GUI options that don't exist; then prompt donations that would go towards the features development. For example, Image > Rotate, triggers a pop-up, "Sorry, Rotating image is not currently a feature but with your support we'd love to add it to GIMP! We expect it will cost $10,000 and we've already raised $4,235 from users like you. Contribute now..."
  • dEnigma 9y ago
    I can't quite tell if you're serious, but I don't think users would like that sort of bait and switch tactic. It would make GIMP feel like shareware that tries to trick you into paying money.
    • conductr 9y ago
      I'm serious but I don't use gimp so what do I know. I'm posing it more as a theoretical question of why can't the collective we be asked to pay for features we want. What I know of Gimp is that it has majority of the features of PS so why would the power users not be willing to pay for advanced features that probably only they use. The answer in my mind is that they are willing to pay but they pay adobe because gimp doesn't ask for money.
    • webmaven 9y ago
      You could avoid the bait-and-switch feeling if the non-implemented features were grayed out to distinguish them from the ones that were already available.
  • frozenport 9y ago
    What if I told you that the non-user friendly aspects of GIMP were by design? I belive there was a battle a decade ago to get rid of odd floating side bars.
    • zanny 9y ago
      Well yeah, there was a battle, and they added single window mode like 6 years ago. Solved the floating bars.
• monocasa 9y ago
  That already happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinePaint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinePaint
• pwthornton 9y ago
  GIMP is a steaming pile of shit. It's not 400k away from being a Photoshop competitor. Maybe it is less so now, but when I last used it, I said never again. If you need Photoshop to actually get work done, the $120 it costs ($120 gets you both Photoshop and Lightroom) is well worth your money. Many people charge more for one hour of contract work than Photoshop costs to buy for an entire year. But there are very good Photoshop competitors that don't cost a lot of money. Pixelmator is $29 and a better program for many users. It's lightning fast to open and use and it requires less computing resources. I remain deeply unconvinced that any software that requires an elite UI and interaction model will ever come out of a software libre solution. In addition, most software libre solutions are simply copies off of someone's else's ideas and hard work. It can't exist without paid software to copy first. What are we even doing in tech and software if we are arguing that people should copy other people's work and then make it free, causing people to lose their jobs?
  • beefsack 9y ago
    > GIMP is a steaming pile of shit. Hyperbole much? GIMP is high quality software and I'm sure I'm not the only one who prefers it to Photoshop.
    • webtechgal 9y ago
      I second that. While I can't realistically say I prefer it over Photoshop since I've never used the later, I can certainly state that GIMP meets ALL my graphics editing requirements (which are not many, but that's besides the point).
  • zanny 9y ago
    Blender, Krita, and Inkscape are all excellent in their domains. What is this nonsense about free software can't have good UX? > copy other people's work and then make it free, causing people to lose their jobs? Wikipedia is a fully free project and the foundation employs ~300 people funded mostly by an annual donation drive. Free software != no jobs. And I really don't want to get into it, but for a lot of free software advocates extorting money from people for licenses using legally granted artificial monopoly of scarcity on software you don't even have to disclose for the cost is highly unethical.
• justboxing 9y ago
  Note to OP. 1) You need a 3rd button for each submission that says "Already Solved". People can post links to SaaS products that already solve the exact problem the users are posting... Example: Following 2 Submission have several products that solve the exact same problem. - Gamify budgeting so I save more money => https://www.demandrush.com/problems/gamified-savings-app https://www.demandrush.com/problems/gamified-savings-app - Community chat on my website => https://www.demandrush.com/problems/onsite-community-chat https://www.demandrush.com/problems/onsite-community-chat 2) You also should introduce some sort of flagging or curation, because quite a few "Problems" read like 1 off specific requests, and some descriptions are also really vague and too broad 3) Might also wanna provide Upvote (only, and no downvote, like ProductHunt and Facebook "Likes" :) button to assess popularity, because not everyone might be mentally willing to commit to monthly payments, but might really "like" the idea and think it deserves to be solved.
  • hackerews 9y ago
    These are great suggestions. Thank you!
    • HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
      Rather than "Already Solved" I'd prefer "Potential Solution." Just because a solution exists does not mean that it's a suitable one, or can't be improved upon.
• mvindahl 9y ago
  There as several affordable and easy-to-use Photoshop alternatives around these days. My personal favourites (on MacOS) are Affinity Designer and Pixelmator. I'm sure that there are others which save you the price tag of Photoshop and the learning curve of Gimp.
• sarah665121 9y ago
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