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GIMP needs a name change and a serious injection of money like Blender. To be honest I don't understand why 'the industry' doesn't want to invest in this. They

by jorvi 5y ago

GIMP needs a name change and a serious injection of money like Blender. To be honest I don't understand why 'the industry' doesn't want to invest in this. They hated being tethered to things like Maya, I can't imagine they enjoy being tethered to Photoshop.

syntheweave 5y ago
It's 90% a project coordination problem, I think. Blender's efforts started early with a foundation being created shortly after it made it first open source release. It took from 2002 to 2006 for the first movie project from the foundation, and those projects were necessary as a spearheading effort to clean up the core featureset. It took roughly another decade of those projects and gradual efforts to revise the UX before the public perception switch flipped from "Blender sucks" to "Blender's awesome." At that point it snowballed and the project is now swimming in resources. But there was always a clear point of contact in the middle steps that helped make the best use of the resources that were there. GIMP doesn't have a foundation to talk to, other than GNOME, which actually makes it harder to engage with because it means you have an institution in the way that fights ICs. GNOME is infamously bad at outreach efforts for its top level applications. What seems to define GNOME, at least in the past decade, is that the thing actually being developed is the libraries, while the existing apps are just being shepherded down the road to keep up. And as long as that's the case, the apps will be undermaintained because the foundation will gravitate towards a "don't touch that" policy for everything that isn't a library feature. GIMP has changed very little as a result. Like, just look at the state of GIMP's developer information. It's a dumpsite. Nobody is in a marketing role or cleaning up documentation. There is development activity, but the bulk of communication about it comes from third party sources who aren't touching the code.
klodolph 5y ago
Maya is $225/month. Photoshop is $21/month. I think that explains at least part of it.
- jorvi 5y ago
  I did not know it is that stark a difference. Thanks for the tidbit!
kasabali 5y ago
See "Cinepaint: The long forgotten GIMP fork that once powered the cinema industry" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28578323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28578323

by jorvi 5y ago

syntheweave 5y ago

It's 90% a project coordination problem, I think. Blender's efforts started early with a foundation being created shortly after it made it first open source release. It took from 2002 to 2006 for the first movie project from the foundation, and those projects were necessary as a spearheading effort to clean up the core featureset. It took roughly another decade of those projects and gradual efforts to revise the UX before the public perception switch flipped from "Blender sucks" to "Blender's awesome." At that point it snowballed and the project is now swimming in resources. But there was always a clear point of contact in the middle steps that helped make the best use of the resources that were there. GIMP doesn't have a foundation to talk to, other than GNOME, which actually makes it harder to engage with because it means you have an institution in the way that fights ICs. GNOME is infamously bad at outreach efforts for its top level applications. What seems to define GNOME, at least in the past decade, is that the thing actually being developed is the libraries, while the existing apps are just being shepherded down the road to keep up. And as long as that's the case, the apps will be undermaintained because the foundation will gravitate towards a "don't touch that" policy for everything that isn't a library feature. GIMP has changed very little as a result. Like, just look at the state of GIMP's developer information. It's a dumpsite. Nobody is in a marketing role or cleaning up documentation. There is development activity, but the bulk of communication about it comes from third party sources who aren't touching the code.

klodolph 5y ago

Maya is $225/month. Photoshop is $21/month. I think that explains at least part of it.

jorvi 5y ago
I did not know it is that stark a difference. Thanks for the tidbit!

kasabali 5y ago

See "Cinepaint: The long forgotten GIMP fork that once powered the cinema industry" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28578323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28578323