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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Gotta be real, Gimp's not that far off from just one guy (https://github.com/GNOME/gimp/graphs/contributors)

We all assume there's a vast army of dedicated people behind these things. Most people do just a tiny bit and don't stick around.

The reality is the core ranks are thin and the troops are exhausted. If you've got the time, they could use a hand (this is for all open source projects)

They people behind them are also usually effectively invisible when compared to the effort they put in so if you're thin on time, hunting down an email to send a sincere personal thank you would really make their day.

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GitHub's "Contributors" graphs are unreliable for working out who really works on a given repo. They (sneakily) only attempt to visualize the commits made by GitHub's own users. GitHub, however, is of course not the whole world. (Gimp itself does not even coordinate development through GitHub.) Commits not tied to a GitHub account are not represented.

Just another lame example of how GitHub both (a) insists upon itself and (b) prioritizes its social network over providing actually useful tooling for getting work done (including but not limited to trying to glean insights about a given project).

> Gotta be real, Gimp's not that far off from just one guy (https://github.com/GNOME/gimp/graphs/contributors)

GitHub only shows people with an email address linked to a GitHub account in that chart; the last time I checked it was 4 or 5 people working on it regularly, which is still a very small team (none are working on it full-time) so your point still stands (it's a point I've made myself a few times before when people compare GIMP to Photoshop or the like).

The GitLab chart[1] also doesn't seem to be accurate; e.g. Mitch only has 986 commits on that one (and almost 14k on the GitHub chart).

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/graphs/master

Yeah, it's a bit better for projects with corporate sponsors who can fund a (small) army of dedicated people to work on the project, but application software (especially if it has a widely used commercial competitor) tends to not fall into this category. I imagine OpenOffice/LibreOffice is in a similar position.

Which is their own fault. They have more than a million dollars in bitcoin donations that haven't been touched in years (Its around 620k now since bitcoin is crashing). That could have easily funded 3 full-time developers for a decade to come.

Since when is $30K a full time developer's salary? Presumably anyone good enough to work full time on GIMP could make at least an order of magnitude more at Adobe etc.

Since countries other than US/some European countries existed. Godot developers get paid in the $30-40k range. I live in Lebanon, and it is normal for talented senior developers to be paid $15-25k a year.

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