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Funding GIMP developers for sustainable development
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Y_Y 5y agoAre conferences good value for money (as a use for free software donations/funding)? Like I get that they're good, I like attending conferences. But if I could choose between employing someone full-time for a month (especially somewhere with low cost of living like India or Eastern Europe) and buying flights and a hotel room for a weekend, I think I'd choose the former.
- meibo 5y agoConferences are essential in building a healthy community - and seeing who you actually "work for", especially as an open source developer. Sure, you can sit on Zoom for an hour or two and hold a talk, but you really can't beat the face-to-face experience. I think it's something you need to experience to see the value in.
- mlang23 5y agoIn my experience, conferences are a very nice to have, unique experiences, interesting people. But productivity? No. When it comes to being productive, I get far more done sitting at my desk at home. I totally understand that conferences are a really nice thing to go to for contributors. But its more a sort of compensation for unpaied work. At some point, you are invited to go to a foreign country, and you get a sort of geek-holiday. Thats nice. But I never considered it essential for my contributions. In fact, my impression actually turned around when the "bring your children" thing started to be normal. I vividly remember a few talks at DebConf where I was not able to follow the speaker because of verbal small children in the talk room. Since then, I really really prefer to listen to talk recordings at home.
- baby 5y agoI always find conferences to be a real boost for productivity personally. You always come out full of ideas and papers to read or implement. The motivation and passion of others can be contaminating as well.
- jcelerier 5y ago> You always come out full of ideas and papers to read or implement. is it really what GIMP needs though ?
- prokoudine 5y agoWe don't go to face-to-face meeting for papers. We come for live interaction, major release level decision-making etc. We tried video conferencing a few times. It's fun but hard to organize (timezones), too messy, and time-consuming. So are chats.
- johannes1234321 5y ago> productivity? No. When it comes to being productive, I get far more done sitting at my desk at home. It depends. For creating production-quality code certainly true. But for design discussions, feature priotisation etc. an in person meeting often is better. Also such events /can/ lead to interesting results from hacking sessions where people collaboratively spin out ideas and code stuff. That code typically needs cleanup, but can spark ideas. Way home from a conference for me often was the time where I had creative new ideas :)
- throwanem 5y agoI feel like, in your third sentence, you may have typed "enjoying" and intended "employing".
- stuaxo 5y agoI don't know about conferences per-say, but something like LibreGraphicsMeeting is, as people developing lots of open source graphics get together and swap ideas. Luckily there is one there has been some funding, at least for travel.
- dcminter 5y agoJust FYI "per-say" should be "per se" - Latin for "by itself."
- prokoudine 5y agoLGM initially was "annual meeting of GIMP devs, but this time — with fellow teams from Scribus, Inkscape, and Xara LX projects" :)
- abhinav22 5y ago(I agree with your opinion) But is the article about conferences? I thought it was about directly supporting some of the developers of GIMP, perhaps I misread
- erikerikson 5y agoI believe that was a reference to restrictions on funding coming from GNOME
- 908B64B197 5y ago> But if I could choose between employing someone full-time for a month (especially somewhere with low cost of living like India or Eastern Europe) and buying flights and a hotel room for a weekend, I think I'd choose the former. A month's worth of a bad programmer's time might be worth a lot less than meeting motivated good software engineers at a conference and potentially turning one or two into contributors.
- stuaxo 5y agoDefinitely fund these guys. I really hope they can get to the point where they are paid as well as those of us that work in commercial software development.
- chronogram 5y agoI’ve donated to GNOME before, but like this new website says, that goes to GIMP as a way to spend on community needs like hardware and conferences. I’ll have to set up Patreon, because directly contributing to Øyvind Kolås’s actual ability to live and contribute sounds like a much better goal.
- frusciante19 5y agoMaybe at some point someone will realize that they can sell a piece of software.
- baby 5y agoNow that photopea is a thing, do people still use gimp?
- KronisLV 5y agoAs nice as Photopea is, it's browser only. Furthermore, GIMP provides a variety of different plugins, extensibility options, hardware support for graphics tablets etc. So the answer is yes, GIMP is still a lovely piece of free software that's utilized by numerous people out there to great effect.
- baby 5y agoGood point. Photopea might become paid in the future also
- npteljes 5y agoPhotopea is not a GIMP replacement, since it's not free software.
- baby 5y agoWhat do you mean it’s not free software? I guess it might not be free anymore one day, which is a good argument for GIMP.
- npteljes 5y agoIt's gratis, but not libre. Some people value this attribute of a software, choosing their toolkit exclusively or primarily so. And for these people, a nonfree software is a not a replacement for a free software. Also yes, because it's only distributed as a web app, one day it might vanish and that's it. If it were AGPL licenced, for example, anyone could fire up another instance or embed it via Electron, and the software would live on.
- someperson 5y agoGIMP needs a major user-interface overhaul like Edward Snowden said on Twitter: https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1416778909358731266?lang=en https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1416778909358731266?lang=...
- petee 5y agoI don't see how Edward Snowden is relevant...if you don't like the UI, just say that.
- benrbray 5y agoIndeed. I really want to like GIMP, but it doesn't hold a candle to my old copy of Photoshop CS4 from ten years ago. From what I can recall, the GIMP UI has hardly changed since then too. I suppose they're probably constrained by what is possible with GTK? Basically it seems like Linux needs a better standard for user interfaces -- I can't think of a GTK app that doesn't have awkard position/spacing/layout issues.
- glandium 5y agoPretty ironic, considering GTK was originally created for GIMP (that's even what the G stood for back then: the GIMP ToolKit).
- daptaq 5y agoI always smile when thinking about the fact that GTK stands for "GNU is not Unix ... is not Unix Image Manimulation Program ToolKit"
- daptaq 5y ago> From what I can recall, the GIMP UI has hardly changed since then too. There have actually been changes, and even if they aren't major, someone like me who has never used anything but GIMP was annoyed/slightly confused by them. I don't know what the issue with GIMP is, besides tools that Photoshop appears to have or has better implementations for. My impressions is that it is mostly Photoshop users, that are expecting something else, or am I mistaken?
- thrwaeasddsaf 5y agoThere's also some low-hanging fruit if someone wants to contribute. E.g. the developer docs are rather outdated. I recently implemented AMD FSR as a Gimp plugin but all the docs led to code that resulted in a slew of deprecation warnings. Also poor performance and some thing just not working right at all (tile cache). I kinda got frustrated with it and dropped the gimp parts altogether, but if I had more time, it shouldn't be hard to figure out and maybe improve the docs or write an up to date tutorial.
- southerntofu 5y agoI think you're not the first person facing this issue. If you feel like it, organizing a hackathon around it, so that you and others can update the docs and polish your respective plugins would be a huge contribution! Speaking as someone who is not a GIMP contributor myself.
- prokoudine 5y agoOnboarding for contributors is very high on my TODO list :) https://www.dropbox.com/s/tll8m18gyh1o1is/gimp-contributor-onboarding.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/tll8m18gyh1o1is/gimp-contributor-o... I'd appreciate actionable feedback on that plan.
- 10GBps 5y agoWoosh, sarcasm not detected. :)
- fmax30 5y agoWhy do you think that the existence of Gnome requires blame? I think gnome is one of the better FOSS projects out there.
- MrDresden 5y agoAs an occasional user of GIMP I'll gladly donate to the developers. This is a piece of software that has made me money, so it is only fair I give back.
- rho4 5y agoBiggest mistake of free software: It's too much hassle to donate. Show me a PayPal yearly subscription confirmation dialog on first startup for something less than 10 dollars, and if it takes 2 clicks at most and less than 10 seconds, you will get my money.
- Joeboy 5y agoThe expression "fork over" was very confusing in this context. I think you're using it in the sense of "hand over money" here.
- rho4 5y agothanks, adjusted
- amelius 5y agoI wish I could fork my money ...
- brnt 5y agoWith shitcoins, you can :)
- stjohnswarts 5y agoIt's a pretty common way of saying it where I grew up. I hope we're not grammar shaming now for such inconsequential statements...
- Joeboy 5y agoThe expression itself is fine, but the original (something like "Free software isn't worth the hassle of forking over") was a confusing collision of terms. It took me a while to work out what meaning they intended. I'm generally relaxed about alternative grammar.
- lixtra 5y agoI agree that convenience is key. For me that is not PayPal. I prefer to support some projects on Patreon.
- wrnr 5y agoOn the same site the news of a no-code startup raising a 100M and OSS begging for scraps, go figure it out.
- modzu 5y agoor don't.. and fund krita or GMIC instead!
- toastal 5y agoI actually get this sentiment. I don't find too much use in GIMP specifically anymore. darktable/RawTherapee can more than pull their weight in photo editing and can handle RAW non-destructively. Krita is better optimized for drawing. Hugin stitches and stacks images better. You may as well use ImageMagick for resizing. GIMP being a jack of all trades, has left it the master of none for me. Maybe had they had more funds 6-8 years ago, it would be in a better spot but right now, I'd rather throw donations at these other projects.
- rkangel 5y agoI'm confused by what appears to be a contradiction at the end. These are consecutive sentences: > Note that it is also possible to fund several contributors through GIMP Liberapay account as an interesting alternative. > What these donations through GNOME still cannot do is funding paid development, so if that’s what you want, please fund the developers directly as explained above. I would rather put money into a single pot for GIMP contributors than have to chose and donate to individual contributors. Can I do that through the liberapay link (https://liberapay.com/GIMP/ https://liberapay.com/GIMP/)? Most things suggest that I can, but the text makes it a little confusing.
- wwarner 5y agoI read the appeal and gave.
- etc-hosts 5y agoHas anyone reached out to the two creators of the GIMP? They're worth many hundreds of millions of dollars from their time at Google, a successful exit to Square, and their eventual exit with Cockroachdb (and they deserve every penny of it)
- lifeisstillgood 5y agoAs someone else noted, there is a no-code startup that just raised 50M and GIMP struggles to fund two developers. I have often thought that one of the most effective ways, if I was say a Texan oil billionaire, most effective ways of spreading my world view would be to pay people to code useful free government and non-gov tools - all software is opinionated- as texan billionaire i would want it to have my opinions Re: Texan Billionaire I just remembered the second Harry Palmer film.
- bwship 5y agoThey raised $100M. Would be $50 million per GIMP developer.
- lifeisstillgood 5y agoThat's a lot of Mountain Dew
- pengaru 5y agoI feel like the distributions have completely dropped the ball in this regard. They're positioned ideally to at least have some measure of what packages are most frequently installed. Even with the use of volunteer public mirrors that share no access logs with the distributor, the package management architecture could be structured to consult distro-controlled metadata servers in locating the mirrors and preserving some visibility into which packages are most installed. They control the package tooling, they should have considered this. With even vague knowledge of which packages are most used, they could be distributing donations to those upstream projects. They obviously already have the dependency graph as well, so even without popularity metrics, can already know which packages are cornerstones (kernel, libc, openssl, systemd, mesa immediately come to mind). The distro installers and package management tools should be providing convenient ways for end-users to donate via whatever mechanisms, paypal, patreon, bitcoin, etc. Just give me one mechanism to throw money at my distro of choice with the clear indication that it will be dispersed to upstream developers of important software. Also give me an easy way to explicitly allocate my funds to specific packages if I am so inclined. Make it all transparent on a web site where the money goes on a high level, how much is coming in, and which projects are getting what %age of that, what % is administration overhead, etc.