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.
Means I end up paralysed around starting new endeavours.
The wage slaves.
IANAL
Obviously a lot more of the details would need to be worked out to try and minimize how much companies try and game that to simply fund their own research tax-free, but I wonder if the type of behavior you're looking for could be economically incentivized given the right corporate tax legal reforms.
From a quick search, it looks like the IRS does sometimes allow businesses to make deductible contributions to a 501(c)3, but that it first attempts to determine if the business expects to receive a "substantial return benefit". [0]
The IRS seems to already have specific rules around "qualified sponsorship payments". [1]
[0] https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/corporat...
[1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p598/ch03.html#en_US_201701...
Google gifted schools Chromebooks, which seems like an incredible act of charity. Except for the fact that you have to pay a subscription to Google to use them. Which means they really just managed to get a tax write-off while picking up more customers.
How do you ensure a company is doing something in the best interests of society or the charity or organization they are donating to, rather than in the best interests of themselves?
Do you happen to have a reference for this? G suite for education is free as far as I know and I wasn't able to find anything else that you might be referring to.
You can see an educational portal listing the cost of the management license at $30 here, which isn't really a complete picture, but demonstrates that we aren't talking about something they give schools for free: https://edu.google.com/products/devices/
Note that this is kinda of well-hidden, but that last link cites the "total cost of ownership" of a $149 Chromebook over three years as $588, which should give you an idea the difference between the hardware they give away, and the eventual cost of everything you need to deploy the suckers.
Schools is definitely big money for Google, it's just well-disguised as an altruistic endeavor.
You need to show that those licenses were not included in the gift. And let's just assume that they're not that stupid.
> Note that this is kinda of well-hidden, but that last link cites the "total cost of ownership" of a $149 Chromebook over three years as $588, which should give you an idea the difference between the hardware they give away, and the eventual cost of everything you need to deploy the suckers.
For a budget windows laptop or tablet the hardware cost would be higher and the support cost unlikely to be lesser.
> Schools is definitely big money for Google
Schools are a tiny segment for Google that would not hurt them in the slightest to lose. The margins on low-end hardware are not exactly the stuff dreams are made of, and they really are making peanuts on ChromeOS. We can and should contrast this to Microsoft, who has been playing the "loss leader" pricing game in educational circles for far longer with far more success.
Generally speaking, it's pretty difficult to tell if charities are actually being charitable, and there is no way to ensure it -- we can't mark each dollar's fall. But we do have laws that cover those sort of 'hidden catch' scenario; you can't trick people into a financial obligation. Is there some other loophole that you can identify?
And of course, as my source demonstrated, there is definitely a license cost to use Chromebooks in a managed environment, and it is not free for educators.
As the situation is _right now_, the law is probably fine, but I'd be against the parent's suggestion of allowing a loophole for them to get to repatriate cash tax-free for this sort of usage, because it's likely just going to work out in their favor, and not in ours or the public interest.
Here's the thing, in corporate devs are as essential as people toghtening nuts in a factory.
The value one produces there is multiplyed by the internal know how, customer base, marketing reach and tight focus management, none of which it's brough by the developer.
That value is stripped from developer work just to be pocketed by management and sales is a myth, besides, if it werent there'd be plenty developers going solo and the median salary would be in the millions.
Edit: and lo and behold, instant downvote. No wonders the tech community is so blind and guillible when it comes to the value argument, from the extraction myth to the stock options gambling.
Some developers are just writing code to satisfy a spec and really could be replaced by any other developer; others are uniquely valuable and significantly increase their employers value, without necessarily being recognised for it.
Good software acts as a multiplier, so it's not equivalent to tightening bolts. It's more equivalent to finding optimisations that reduce the number of bolts which need to be tightened. A relatively small amount of software can drastically increase the value of a company/process
It's true that an individual can't do the same things a company can do. That's not some profound assertion. It's however impossible to go from that and assert that is because they are incapable of doing those things even if they had the funding to do so. That is to say that the marketing issue is more or less an issue of funding or money. That is what keeps that individual devs from capturing more value that is instead captured by companies or by managers, marketers, etc. As well as hiring additional people to form an actual company that performs the functions of a company. However a significant number of founders are developers, many of them including Paul Gahram and Mark Zuckerberg average developers that went to found multi-million to billion dollar companies because of funding. Now after the fact maybe you can argue that there was something special about them, but that's a post-facto assertion. They were average devs and if they had not gotten the funding would be relegated to your nut bolt tighteners not having been able to express their "true" potential.
1996 (±2 years) in an arcade, actually.
It was really ragged, so much so that the bank wouldn't take it. So I still have it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-391...
The last one is the best.
You ask if anyone lost any money. If someone says they did, you follow up with "how much money, and how big were the bills?"
Then they have to know an amount, how many bills, and what denomination.
You can imagine that it's hard to fake, and anyone being genuine will have a pretty good idea of what you're holding.
It happens.
If you allow for faux currency exchange, keeping your eyes aimed down at a renaissance fairground is pretty much guaranteed to turn up enough food tickets for a turkey leg.
Also, "proof" is a noun. You meant to use verb form "proove". "Proof" as a verb means to "proof-read" (to read with an editorial mindset).
Once, while eating a pizza with canned mussels, he felt something hard. It turned out there was a pearl in his pizza.
Sometimes money literally falls out my pocket when I fumble out a wad of cash while i'm inebriated.
Other times I carelessly leave my wallet somewhere stupid and the money "walks off."
Over the past 2 years, I've probably lost over $1000 this way.
But it was neat, finding money just right out there on my own lawn.
"....In a similar situation in Los Angeles four staff members and I were talking in front of the Biltmore Hotel when I demonstrated the same point, saying: "Look, I am holding a ten-dollar bill in my hand. I propose to walk around the Biltmore Hotel, a total of four blocks, and try to give it away. This will certainly be outside of everyone's experience. You four walk behind me and watch the faces of the people I'll approach. I am going to go up to them holding out this ten-dollar bill and say, 'Here, take this.' My guess is that everyone will back off, look confused, insulted, or fearful, and want to get away from this nut fast.
From their experience when someone approaches them he is either out to ask for instructions or to panhandle — particularly the way I'm dressed, no coat or tie."
I walked around, trying to give the ten-dollar bill away. The reactions were all "within the experiences of the people." About three of them, seeing the ten-dollar bill, spoke first — "I'm sorry. I don't have any change." Others hurried past saying, "I'm sorry, I don't have any money on me right now," as though I had been trying to get money from them instead of trying to give them money. One young woman flared up, almost screaming, "I'm not that kind of a girl and if you don't get away from here, I'll call a cop!" Another woman in her thirties snarled, "I don't come that cheap!" There was one man who stopped and said, "What kind of a con game is this?"...."
https://archive.org/stream/RulesForRadicals/RulesForRadicals...
I'd give up on ten dollars if it means not having to fight/argue this way on the street.
Chris Webber, for example, took less than a $40k salary without benefits to work on MediaGoblin full time for a year:
The games industry gladly takes advantage of this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And most developers are definitely underpaid relative to the value we provide. From shabby CRUD through deep machine learning research, we're generally underpaid. Partly it's our own collective fault, though: as a group we're told constantly that passion for the product and satisfaction at "being paid [anything] for doing what you love" should be enough, and enough of us buy that crap that it effectively depresses wages.
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.
From my experience, you can hire a good developer from Vietnam for approx ~2k per month; which is 24k per year.