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$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,

$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.
- com2kid 9y ago
  > Photoshop's content-aware fill first appeared as a third-party open-source plugin for the GIMP. Indeed it did, and that plugin was hard to configure and hard to use. I remember installing GIMP just to try that plugin out, and it was not fun, it involved a lot of manual steps to get it working, and I never quite got the hang of it. In contrast, when I got my hands on a version of PS that supported content aware fill, (which admittedly ships in the box, skipping the installation step) I was able to figure it out in a few minutes and start getting good results in half an hour. I am pretty sure I spent more than half an hour trying to get the GIMP plugin installed.
  - XaspR8d 9y ago
    I still can't get the GIMP resynthesis plugins to run on most of my machines...
- jasonx1e 9y ago
  I find Photoshop v Gimp akin to Android v iOS.
  - dajohnson89 9y ago
    You mean other way around?
- SippinLean 9y ago
  Last time I tried the lack of Adjustment Layers and Smart Objects was a dealbreaker for me. Maybe that's changed but those are things I use daily (I can deal with lack of content-aware fill).
bqe 9y ago
This reminds me of the joke about the economist who refuses to pick up the $20 bill on the ground because surely someone else would have already picked it up.
- justboxing 9y ago
  LOL. Hadn't heard this one before.
- milesvp 9y ago
  Yeah, this joke sums up just about every arbitrage situation I think I've found. I think, naw, it must be an illusion, because the market is so efficient... Means I end up paralysed around starting new endeavours.
  - devoply 9y ago
    Yeah the market for open source is shit. You have tons of corporations deriving billions in total profit off the back of open source that contribute maybe a million back and feel that they have done some great great deed... like say Google. You could easily make the Gimp much much better with a few million in funding. The beauty of capitalism is exactly that it locks out this sort of behavior because of the way that corporations and consumers behave with their money... and how people relegated at to the lowly level of employee is forced to behave by the rules of working for that corporation and the small amount of money it pays for work which may deliver up to 10x its value, value captured by the shareholders.
    - boramalper 9y ago
      And I think copyleft licenses offer a solution here: if you are worried that corporations (or rival corporations) might monetize your product (or derive any profit from it indirectly), licensing it under a copyleft license would make their lives very, very hard. It's near impossible, for instance, to keep an AGPLv3-licensed product within a walled-garden, hence good luck while trying to build a *AAS on that.
tajen 9y ago
Seriously, how much work goes into Gimp nowadays? I seem to have the same version today as 5 years ago. I'd love to help kickstart a new beginning (run a kickstarter with a specific proposal?) but I'm afraid they're stuck with bad UI decisions and the bad decision workflow which lead to them.
- p0nce 9y ago
  My biggest complaint is how painful it is to change brush size and brush opacity.
zackify 9y ago
I wish my company spent 400k per 3 employees.
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  I was assuming non-sf salaries... but yes, even then, it's really pushing it to say it would pay for 3 people in the us. I was being generous.
  - chrshawkes 9y ago
    What senior dev makes less than 100k in the USA these days?
    - rgbrenner 9y ago
      Who said anything about senior devs? If you're really hung up on whether 3 is the right number, I think you've entirely missed the point of my post. Adobe has far more people working on photoshop.
    - sidlls 9y ago
      Plenty, outside of the usual suspect locations (SF, NY). A six figure salary for devs, senior or otherwise, is unusual outside those areas. It's not unheard of, but it's not typical, either.
      - chipotle_coyote 9y ago
        I'm not convinced the $150K+ salary figures I see sniffed at on HN as "bare minimums" are quite as common even in SF/NY/etc. as people imagine they are. Startups and (some) "star name" tech companies in those areas hit those figures, but even today I still see more technical jobs than one might imagine in the $80-120K range. I'm aware a lot of software engineers insist that when they're only making $140K they're underpaid given all the Amazing Stupendous Value™ they bring to their companies, but I have some doubts about how sustainable such figures are going to be at most employers as the VC markets tighten (which is definitely happening now).
rubber_duck 9y ago
Lol - you can get 6 senior devs (3+ years experience/independent), or a 4/4 split senior/junior devs depending on what skills you're looking for (in East Europe) The bigger issue is if you can pull a 400k Kickstarter and manage such a team why the hell would you be wasting your time on GIMP dev - you could do waay more profitable and interesting stuff.
ianai 9y ago
The question isn't whether 400k would make gimp replace PS. The question is whether 400k could get the users who contributed the features they want. It still is a gamble but it's more attainable.
thearn4 9y ago
Yeah ~3 FTE sounds about right. But if offered as grants for students to work on over internships or something, it would go a bit further. But I don't know enough about the GIMP codebase to know how feasible that would really be.
cortesoft 9y ago
I think they are also underestimating how much Adobe spends on developing photoshop.
- vermontdevil 9y ago
  When you load up PS, you see a list of people involved. It's a lot more than 3 FTEs.
tomhallett 9y ago
This comparison also ignores other products in the market which already fill this gap. Yes, GIMP could be improved with a bigger budget, but in that time frame would it be better than Pixelmator which only costs $30? And if it is better, would that type of customer value it at your proposed $400 vs $30 for a product which already works right now? [1] http://www.pixelmator.com/mac/ http://www.pixelmator.com/mac/
sathley 9y ago
I agree. Gimp will need just as many developers as Adobe employs, and just as much money as Adobe makes, to be more 'like' Photoshop.
1337biz 9y ago
I am not sure if GIMP is truly the competitor for PS. I do almost all of my editing with a handful of apps. Back then I tried doing it all with PS and the results were a lot worse as it was way to complex to understand all its features.
tuananh 9y ago
400k is plenty if you can hire people from developing countries. From my experience, you can hire a good developer from Vietnam for approx ~2k per month; which is 24k per year.
webmaven 9y ago
> $400k pays for 3 people Yes, but it is three full time people. Don't underestimate the difference being able to focus on a codebase for an extended period makes... Also, knowing that you will be able to continue that focus carries it's own benefit.

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.

com2kid 9y ago
> Photoshop's content-aware fill first appeared as a third-party open-source plugin for the GIMP. Indeed it did, and that plugin was hard to configure and hard to use. I remember installing GIMP just to try that plugin out, and it was not fun, it involved a lot of manual steps to get it working, and I never quite got the hang of it. In contrast, when I got my hands on a version of PS that supported content aware fill, (which admittedly ships in the box, skipping the installation step) I was able to figure it out in a few minutes and start getting good results in half an hour. I am pretty sure I spent more than half an hour trying to get the GIMP plugin installed.
- XaspR8d 9y ago
  I still can't get the GIMP resynthesis plugins to run on most of my machines...
jasonx1e 9y ago
I find Photoshop v Gimp akin to Android v iOS.
- dajohnson89 9y ago
  You mean other way around?
SippinLean 9y ago
Last time I tried the lack of Adjustment Layers and Smart Objects was a dealbreaker for me. Maybe that's changed but those are things I use daily (I can deal with lack of content-aware fill).

bqe 9y ago

This reminds me of the joke about the economist who refuses to pick up the $20 bill on the ground because surely someone else would have already picked it up.

justboxing 9y ago
LOL. Hadn't heard this one before.
milesvp 9y ago
Yeah, this joke sums up just about every arbitrage situation I think I've found. I think, naw, it must be an illusion, because the market is so efficient... Means I end up paralysed around starting new endeavours.
- devoply 9y ago
  Yeah the market for open source is shit. You have tons of corporations deriving billions in total profit off the back of open source that contribute maybe a million back and feel that they have done some great great deed... like say Google. You could easily make the Gimp much much better with a few million in funding. The beauty of capitalism is exactly that it locks out this sort of behavior because of the way that corporations and consumers behave with their money... and how people relegated at to the lowly level of employee is forced to behave by the rules of working for that corporation and the small amount of money it pays for work which may deliver up to 10x its value, value captured by the shareholders.
  - boramalper 9y ago
    And I think copyleft licenses offer a solution here: if you are worried that corporations (or rival corporations) might monetize your product (or derive any profit from it indirectly), licensing it under a copyleft license would make their lives very, very hard. It's near impossible, for instance, to keep an AGPLv3-licensed product within a walled-garden, hence good luck while trying to build a *AAS on that.

tajen 9y ago

Seriously, how much work goes into Gimp nowadays? I seem to have the same version today as 5 years ago. I'd love to help kickstart a new beginning (run a kickstarter with a specific proposal?) but I'm afraid they're stuck with bad UI decisions and the bad decision workflow which lead to them.

p0nce 9y ago
My biggest complaint is how painful it is to change brush size and brush opacity.

zackify 9y ago

I wish my company spent 400k per 3 employees.

rgbrenner 9y ago
I was assuming non-sf salaries... but yes, even then, it's really pushing it to say it would pay for 3 people in the us. I was being generous.
- chrshawkes 9y ago
  What senior dev makes less than 100k in the USA these days?
  - rgbrenner 9y ago
    Who said anything about senior devs? If you're really hung up on whether 3 is the right number, I think you've entirely missed the point of my post. Adobe has far more people working on photoshop.
  - sidlls 9y ago
    Plenty, outside of the usual suspect locations (SF, NY). A six figure salary for devs, senior or otherwise, is unusual outside those areas. It's not unheard of, but it's not typical, either.
    - chipotle_coyote 9y ago
      I'm not convinced the $150K+ salary figures I see sniffed at on HN as "bare minimums" are quite as common even in SF/NY/etc. as people imagine they are. Startups and (some) "star name" tech companies in those areas hit those figures, but even today I still see more technical jobs than one might imagine in the $80-120K range. I'm aware a lot of software engineers insist that when they're only making $140K they're underpaid given all the Amazing Stupendous Value™ they bring to their companies, but I have some doubts about how sustainable such figures are going to be at most employers as the VC markets tighten (which is definitely happening now).

rubber_duck 9y ago

Lol - you can get 6 senior devs (3+ years experience/independent), or a 4/4 split senior/junior devs depending on what skills you're looking for (in East Europe) The bigger issue is if you can pull a 400k Kickstarter and manage such a team why the hell would you be wasting your time on GIMP dev - you could do waay more profitable and interesting stuff.

ianai 9y ago

The question isn't whether 400k would make gimp replace PS. The question is whether 400k could get the users who contributed the features they want. It still is a gamble but it's more attainable.

thearn4 9y ago

Yeah ~3 FTE sounds about right. But if offered as grants for students to work on over internships or something, it would go a bit further. But I don't know enough about the GIMP codebase to know how feasible that would really be.

cortesoft 9y ago

I think they are also underestimating how much Adobe spends on developing photoshop.

vermontdevil 9y ago
When you load up PS, you see a list of people involved. It's a lot more than 3 FTEs.

tomhallett 9y ago

This comparison also ignores other products in the market which already fill this gap. Yes, GIMP could be improved with a bigger budget, but in that time frame would it be better than Pixelmator which only costs $30? And if it is better, would that type of customer value it at your proposed $400 vs $30 for a product which already works right now? [1] http://www.pixelmator.com/mac/ http://www.pixelmator.com/mac/

sathley 9y ago

I agree. Gimp will need just as many developers as Adobe employs, and just as much money as Adobe makes, to be more 'like' Photoshop.

1337biz 9y ago

I am not sure if GIMP is truly the competitor for PS. I do almost all of my editing with a handful of apps. Back then I tried doing it all with PS and the results were a lot worse as it was way to complex to understand all its features.

tuananh 9y ago

400k is plenty if you can hire people from developing countries. From my experience, you can hire a good developer from Vietnam for approx ~2k per month; which is 24k per year.

webmaven 9y ago

> $400k pays for 3 people Yes, but it is three full time people. Don't underestimate the difference being able to focus on a codebase for an extended period makes... Also, knowing that you will be able to continue that focus carries it's own benefit.