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Comment by thinkloop | Hacker News Reader

I 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)

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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.

Someone should put up a site that lists the least funded projects per capita in order: income divided by number of users/utility

Problem 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.

Those are good challenges to bring up.

In terms of usage, I think publicly available data can provide a useful enough picture:

- downloads

- upvotes (ex. github stars)

- homepage traffic

- forum activity (ex. stackoverflow)

- reported corporate usage

- etc.

Finding out current funding is more difficult, and seems to rely on self-reporting and trust.

If the site also accepted donations for projects, it could display which are most underfunded on its platform relative to their utility.

Debian has popcon data, popcon is a default in Ubuntu I think too?

From the man page of popularity-contest:

       The resulting statistic is available from the project home page http://popcon.debian.org/.

       Normally,  popularity-contest  is  run  from  a  cron(8) job, /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest, which automatically submits the
       results to Debian package maintainers  (only  once  a  week)  according  to  the  settings  in  /etc/popularity-contest.conf  and
       /usr/share/popularity-contest/default.conf.

It is so important to support things like Gimp. The alternative is truly being in thrall to Adobe forever.

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