An Interview with Krita Maintainer Boudewijn Rempt

I worked with Boudewijn and the rest of the Krita team during two Google Summers of Code, and I still remember the great experience. It was only a few years later that I fully understood how much patience and commitment they put into my contributions (it was my very first programming "job"). They helped me grow as a developer, and taught me how to work in a team.

Boud is not only a great developer: he's been a great teacher, and a wonderful person. He even sent me a letter with one of his favorite books, and I still have it in my library behind my desk :)

I am really excited every time I see new progress on Krita, it's a really good piece of software, and its developers always like to take new challenges.

Congrats to Boudewijn and to Krita!

Emanuele

I met Boudewijn Rempt at a free software conference in Brazil a couple of years ago. Although I only know him from talking at a conference and not from working together, I was impressed with his good nature and his commitment to his project and his community. It seemed to me that the free software community would be lucky to have more project maintainers like him.

The history of Krita is briefly mentioned in the interview - I think I first tried Krita around 2005 or so. At the time, it was basically KDE's GIMP as part of KDE's productivity suite (which kind of sucked anyways). That put it in an awkward position of competing head-on with the leading Linux image editor, targeting mostly the same user base, and that basically made it unattractive to users.

With a focus on digital painting, however, it has a great niche. It now performs great on an area that GIMP never really focused on and it's a very feasible goal to be on par with or better than Photoshop on that particular aspect. That way it can be "a great painting program" rather than "Photoshop but free".

How good is Krita? Are a significant number people using it instead of Photoshop?