Funding GIMP developers for sustainable development
gimp.org
gimp.org
Second point: why show it on the first start? People don't trust or like the software at first, so they would just click X and begin using the software. Some would even think it's intrusive.
Rather, I've seen solutions where the software would ask for money right after it's been useful to the user. Duplicati for example would tell you to donate, suggested amounts, right after it successfully restored a backup.
I'm sorry, I believe the article directly contradicts your statement since its mentioned they receive donations outside of GNOME, in platforms such as Liberapay, and it's the only way to pay for actual development.
A perennial issue for GIMP, at least their branding is consistent though :)
User experience is the study in how to optimize an users' experience, so that they can solve issues or tasks faster, easier or better. UX might affect how an app behaves or how it looks but it isn't tightly tied into the visuals of an application. Aesthetics are just a small part of UX but usually a rather big part in UI.
No one donates to software they don't trust. By the time they read the donation banner and consider it, its because they use the software and trust it.
This should be as direct and hassle free as possible, I agree with OP.
So in fact you need to be on Liberapay, Patreon, Tippee, OpenCollective, Paypal, HelloAsso and more in order to be sure you're not going to lose your source of donations from one day to the next. I mean if only every finance services provider was as transparent and benevolent as Liberapay, all would be fine. But we live in a grim world, and even Liberapay was almost shut down due to not finding a suitable finance service provider after Mangopay threw them out.
That's why i truly appreciate when some established non-profits help gather funds for smaller projects. For example, the disroot.org hosting coop redirects some funds to free-software projects they either use directly or encourage their users to use. What i appreciate even more, is when i can donate cash in person to volunteers during free-software conferences, and/or buy a souvenir like a nice t-shirt... That's truly the only way i know where my money is going, cryptocurrencies aside.
Some people have had PayPal accounts for a decade plus, like me. I'm really not about to make a transaction with a random company simply cause I don't need to enter my phone number.
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.
I think it's something you need to experience to see the value in.
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.
is it really what GIMP needs though ?
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 :)
Luckily there is one there has been some funding, at least for travel.
But is the article about conferences? I thought it was about directly supporting some of the developers of GIMP, perhaps I misread
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.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tll8m18gyh1o1is/gimp-contributor-o...
I'd appreciate actionable feedback on that plan.
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.
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?
I use GIMP for my (modest) editing needs, and I like it. But some of the behaviour is.... weird.
For example, if you've got a region selected and you use the flood fill tool, it will only fill pixels within that region. OK, that's logical enough, a tool only applies to selected pixels, right?
But if you've got a region selected and you use the move tool, it'll move the entire layer. If you want to move only the pixels in the selected region, you gotta convert it to a floating selection.
And after you've moved your floating selection, you want to select a different region to move, so you drag out a new selection. Not so fast, your floating region has now vanished. You gotta defloat the selection by selecting nothing. But you can't do that by choosing 'None' in the 'Select' menu, that's greyed out for some reason.
I'm sure these behaviours all make sense to a developer or expert user - but nobody's going to be telling their friends that GIMP is easy to pick up :)
I use both and I think GIMP is really usable and the UI isn't that bad. There were some changes though, so people should take a look at the latest version.
I mean, that's the theory, but I just find photo editing to be all around much more comfortable in Krita despite using GIMP for years.
Also one of Photoshop's main domain is digital painting (https://www.google.com/search?q=making+digital+painting+with...) which is what Krita focuses on. You don't really draw with Illustrator.
I meant Fresco instead of Illustrator, I forget the names of Adobe apps constantly.
Expecting that a piece of software undertakes an ambitious UI overhaul (which is no small feat) without one or both of those resources shows, to me, a lack of understanding.
As far as I know GIMP does not have a face for the press, does not organize conferences, has no one contacting businesses for funding. And it has an unfortunate joke name.
One is what you wrote - that it needs a product manager and tons of manhours just to do what's essentially a refactor. Not to mention that GIMP devs said that many UI changes would imply backend changes too, because of limitations. And they are working on those limitations, among other things. Second part of the point is that Adobe must have like 50 people work on Photoshop, and I guess even more when you consider the overlaps with their other products. Compare this to the active contributor number to GIMP.
The second point is that many people compare it to Photoshop like Photoshop is a gold standard of usability. It's just as a nightmare as GIMP if you're not used to it. So, it's not really GIMP's fault that people are used to something else.
The other factor is that Blender was always a tool by and for actual companies doing real commercial work and understands those needs. GIMP on the other started as a university project that got picked up the GNU project, and has always been more of a 'research' project.
We ask for rationalization of suggested changes. For some reason people think it's hostile.
The GIMP's weakness is color management.
I'd rather GIMP focused on adding features that Photoshop and other competitors have.
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)
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/)? Most things suggest that I can, but the text makes it a little confusing.
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.
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.
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.
:)