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Call for help: fund GIMP development and Libre animation
- dahoramanodoceu 9y agoIm a huge fan of GIMP. If I had money I'd fefinitely chip in. Here's my emotional support: <3
- jlgaddis 9y agoI'm not a GIMP user but I just chipped in a few dollars on your behalf. In the future, if or when you are able, please consider paying it forward.
- cryo 9y agoJust joined on Patreon, using GIMP since +5 years.
- AsyncAwait 9y agoIf you want to support GIMP on Patreon, here are direct links for the key developers: - https://www.patreon.com/pippin https://www.patreon.com/pippin - https://www.patreon.com/zemarmot https://www.patreon.com/zemarmot
- hippich 9y agoone thing killing me, because credit cards are involved, with $1 it ends up with $0.35 + 2.7% + 5% fees. So for small monthly contribution of $1 developer gets $0.59... there is clearly market for something more efficient...
- AsyncAwait 9y agoIt seems like cryptocurrencies could help here, if only the friction was still lowered significantly.
- hobarrera 9y agoThere's still money being lost; when you buy coins, and when the developer sells them. Unless they can pay their usual expenses using cryptocurrencies, they'll need to sell, at a loss (even if possible less than CC).
- AsyncAwait 9y agoIn practically any monetary transaction, there's some overhead and thus money being lost, (3rd parties involved, price volatility etc.) and so the question then becomes, how much money is being lost? Cryptocurrencies offer lower overhead in this regard, at least for now.
- progval 9y agoLiberapay is a libre alternative for Patreon (with anonymous patrons and no reward) with much lower fees for bank transfer/automatic debit [1], as it is funded via donations [1]: https://liberapay.com/about/faq https://liberapay.com/about/faq
- Marmot2017 9y agoAnd you can start pledging to a project before they have joined. https://liberapay.com/on/twitter/GIMP_Official/ https://liberapay.com/on/twitter/GIMP_Official/
- antler2 9y agoCan the devs send IBAN/PM it to me? I hate to pay some third party %charges? I am in France itself would like to make a Bank Transfer
- Marmot2017 9y agoSee the bottom of page http://film.zemarmot.net/en/ http://film.zemarmot.net/en/
- ZenoArrow 9y ago> "there is clearly market for something more efficient..." https://en.liberapay.com/ https://en.liberapay.com/
- exikyut 9y agoWhat about a system that holds X amount of donations in escrow until the amount hits a certain threshold, then releases the total amount in one actual (bank/payment processor) transfer. Might mean lower fees. Such a service could also have a "release funds now" option for emergencies where you'd accept paying hiked-up fees.
- maxyme 9y agoA problem is that there is a limit on how long you can wait to make a credit card charge before your first verification charge expires. If that makes sense. Basically there's no way to determine the card has 3 months of $1 on it when you want to make the charge and if you make it earlier you pay the fees.
- exikyut 9y agoExtremely good point. I was just thinking about the intermediary->payee bit. I forgot the payer->intermediary bit, and that this is a credit card charge too. Now I realize I mentally modeled the whole problem incorrectly. Thanks for pointing that out.
- jimnotgym 9y agoTo put this into perspective EUR400 a month is about what 7 seats on Adobe cc would cost. I hope GIMP users can dig deep. Glad to see this story on the front page
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ckdarby 9y agoCan someone explain to me why open source projects don't take on more 'sponsors'? For example, one of my employers used to use the open source software Chronos. There is a lot of lacking GPU support in chronos, we opened up an issue and nobody wanted to tackle it, and in all honesty, if they had an easy way of getting the core contributors to be paid to add support they would have considered this. Fast forward, they had a dedicated internal developer build out a very specific replacement for our needs.
- jononor 9y agoMany* open source projects are ran by volunteers on their spare time. They do it for the fun of it, and often have a full time job already (possibly writing software, or not). Doing sponsored development involves many activities besides coding, that volunteer contributors might not be particularly skilled at or even interested in learning/doing: - Attracting sponsors, cutting deals - Extracting customer requirements, estimating work, project planning - Developing things that themselves dont need/want - Documenting and reporting on the work done Some employeers may frown upon someone taking a serious obligation that sponsored work is, but be supportive of a hobby level project. It might also complicate your tax situation, and there can be liability considerations. Many contributors are also not professional software developers, and may not feel comfortable promising to deliver specific outcomes. * these days there are also many open source projects ran by companies, or engineers on company time.
- jononor 9y agoBear in mind that open-source software was much more niche just 5-10 years ago. It was considerably less common for companies to make use of FOSS, understand it and be willing to invest in it. Even the idea that it was possible to get paid for developing software that is given away to everyone for free was rather unorthodox. Best practices in financially sustaining open-source projects are still developing, and I think we will see much more of it in the future.
- danieldk 9y ago
- miduil 9y agoGIMP initially started as an university project, that, by now, has been developed for almost 20 years. Just in the past seven days there've been 9305 LOC additions and 3535 deletions, according to the github mirror [0]. It's one of the most important projects for the open source desktop, for example GTK (formerly GIMP Toolkit) is one very important outcome. Please support GIMP, because it's more than 'just' a Photoshop alternative. [0]: https://github.com/GNOME/gimp/compare/master@%7B1507386622%7D...master https://github.com/GNOME/gimp/compare/master@%7B1507386622%7...
- jqcr98vw 9y ago> it's more than 'just' a Photoshop alternative. Can you elaborate on that? With Photoshop being relatively cheap to use only when I need it, I have a hard time supporting an Open Source tool that never seems to meet my needs. What am I missing?
- krapp 9y agoPhotoshop, along with other Adobe software, now uses a subscription based model which users may not be able to justify, unless they're a student or professional constantly using it and recouping the cost. Adobe also links all of your software and access to your data with a single account password which the company has proven incapable of managing securely. So those are two good reasons to use Gimp - no recurring fees and no worries about the cloud. Although the best reason not to use Gimp, albeit an unfair one from Gimp's point of view (but still relevant,) is the degree of lock-in to proprietary Adobe formats and tools that pervades the graphics, editing and design professions. >I have a hard time supporting an Open Source tool that never seems to meet my needs. What am I missing? Simply having a decent, free alternative to Photoshop should be worth something.
- colejohnson66 9y ago> Adobe also links all of your software and access to your data with a single account password which the company has proven incapable of managing securely. I’m not defending the Creative Cloud model, but you don’t have to save your data in the cloud. It’s just like how Apple has iCloud and Microsoft has OneDrive. Sure, you can save your data in the cloud, but you don’t have to.
- stuaxo 9y agoThere are some really great little fixes that have gone into GIMP as a result of this project. A list from 2.9.6 is here - https://girinstud.io/news/2017/09/gimp-2-9-6-zemarmot/ https://girinstud.io/news/2017/09/gimp-2-9-6-zemarmot/
- Kiro 9y agoIs he the only developer of GIMP? The text makes it sound like that. What am I funding exactly?
- stagger87 9y agoBoth of your questions are answered in the short text. In the first paragraph he states that he is not the only developer and links a contributor list. Throughout the text he mentions funds would help purchase a new computer and help with his everyday bills (rent/food/etc.)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Joeboy 9y agoFair question, it's a bit confusing because their patreon page focuses largely on ZeMarmot, an open source film. But it seems like the money will actually go to these people who also contribute to GIMP and other OSS, and who sound like they're currently in very poor financial shape. I contributed a modest monthly amount because it sounds like they do worthwhile things and could use a break, and also I would like GIMP to suck less. tldr; This is not an official GIMP request for funding, but a request for funding by individuals who contribute to GIMP.
- thinkloop 9y agoI rag on gimp all the time, yet I never end up buying photoshop, and it always gets the job done. We have a co-dependent love-hate relationship that will probably last all time. I'm constantly shocked at how massive, important open source projects turn out to have so little funding. It's hard to tell which ones are Mozillas (super rich and sophisticated), and which are OpenSSL and Gimp (grossly underfunded working out of a bedroom). I imagined gimp being a 50 person team in an office. (started supporting gimp)
- danieldk 9y agoI'm constantly shocked at how massive, important open source projects turn out to have so little funding. It's hard to tell which ones are Mozillas (super rich and sophisticated), and which are OpenSSL and Gimp (grossly underfunded working out of a bedroom). I imagined gimp being a 50 person team in an office. It is shocking, especially because so much of all infrastructure depends on these projects, especially OpenBSD, GnuPG, OpenSSL, etc. I would absolutely pay for a 'subscription' where I could, say, spend 20 Euro per month and the money gets automatically spread over the open source programs/projects that I use. Things are heading in the right direction with Patreon, BountySource, et al. but I would like to sponsor on a amount-of-use basis.
- thinkloop 9y agoSomeone should put up a site that lists the least funded projects per capita in order: income divided by number of users/utility
- zanny 9y agoProblem is no real reputable free software project (in order of rising significance) downloads, installs, or usage hours because most people that want liberated software also don't want tracking. Also, different projects disclose their funding differently (if at all). Just in this context as an example Krita lists their monthly donations on their site but Gimp is just considered a part of GNOME - there is a Krita Foundation whereas Gimp donations go to the GNOME Foundation, so it would be hard given the Gnome Foundations budget statements to deduce what money is actually going to Gimp and what amount is coming in to Gimp.
- Jdam 9y agoGIMP only always remembers me how much I miss Paint.Net on my Mac. Just last week I had to do some image manipulation. Since pretty much all Paint derivatives for Mac suck hard, I preferred to spin up a Windows EC2 instance, install Paint.Net and get the job done, instead of using this UX clusterfuck named GIMP.
- danieldk 9y agoOn the Mac there is not particularly a shortage of good photo/image editors, from affordable to expensive. Acorn, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, Photoshop.
- Jdam 9y agoI’m not a professional and don’t want to learn Photoshop for ages. Also, oftentimes very basic ones are not sufficient, like most cheap ones from the AppStore. I haven’t found a proper substitute for this niche between super basic ones and Photoshop.
- cptskippy 9y agoThat's the one thing that has always bothered me about GIMP and I honestly don't find Photoshop to be all that much better. I had access to Corel Photopaint and Adobe Photoshop a decade ago and always preferred Corel over Adobe, the UI just seemed more intuitive. Then when Photoshop began to dominate, Corel transformed Photopaint into a me-too copy of Photoshop. I have Photoshop on my work laptop and I use it mainly out of convenience but don't enjoy it. I have actually tried to get all assets as SVG and stay in Inkscape if at all possible. Inkscape's UI isn't the best either , I'm not quite sure why I prefer it to Photoshop but I do.
- fabrika 9y agoIt's been 20 years now without any success. Maybe it's time to move on?
- BeetleB 9y ago>It's been 20 years now without any success. Maybe it's time to move on? A huge number of users is not what I'd call "without any success". As I mentioned elsewhere, when I got serious into photoediting about 10 years ago, GIMP was the best alternative to Photoshop - better than any other commercial tool.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoI use it all the time for makingjournal figures. Simple stuff. Cropping, rescaling, color based selection, recoloring, gradients, etc.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoTo put some figures to it, Debian's popcon [0] lists it as having 100k installs (out of 200k 'surveyed' systems). For comparison Steam has 6k installs in the same survey. Steam claim to have 67M active monthly [1], and 0.6% linux users; ~40k linux users. Guesstimation: if the 200k surveyed on Debian are representative and Steam installs is a representative sample then we can estimate that if the 6k installs of Steam represent half of the Steam surveyed Linux users that [3] ~300k people are using GIMP on Linux. In the popcon survey a fifth of users are regular users. On other OS users have a wider range of good alternatives IMO, but if we recall that Linux desktop usage is about 1-4% then we can expect of the order of millions of other GIMP users. The number suggest one could call it successful. [0] https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gimp https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gimp, https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=steam https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=steam [1] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/valve-reveals-steams-monthly-active-user-count-game-sales-region/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/valve-reveals-steams-monthly-a... [2] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey [3] 40k users of Steam, if half are on Debian-like systems and a 200k sample of them show 6k steam users that's 3.3 times less; if GIMP then is underreported to the same amount we can provide a rough minimum actual installs on Linux.
- bryanrasmussen 9y agoI would argue that a donation is legally deductible for a business if it can be tied to a feature request that is then implemented.
- phkahler 9y agoAnd I would donate to GIMP development if I could fund specific feature development. In particular I want the move to GTK 3 completed, followed closely by moving to Wayland. Those are already project goals, but I'd want to influence the priority ;-)
- bryanrasmussen 9y agoWell I guess I'll be funding anyway, but I expect my argument for a deduction might be overturned, which if I could fund a feature it wouldn't be. Really all open source teams should consider this - not that people say I will fund X if you do Y but rather we intend to do A,B,C 'pay' towards the feature you want to prioritize.
- sharno 9y agoI love what GIMP is doing and it's a not very famous part of open source software. I'd definitely try to donate as soon as I have enough to support myself first :)
- tech4all 9y agoI have received a TON of utility and joy from Gimp over the years... Happy to help!