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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

I love that they are also selling the software in stores (MS, Steam, Epic). You don't get anything extra apart from the automatic updates but it's certainly a nice way to get people to pay for your FOSS project.

Back in 2019 they mentioned that "Krita has gone from 2 to 4 full-time developers over the last 10 months, and Steam has been instrumental in raising the funds to make that possible" https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d2ic2e/krita_is_now_...

I wish more project would do the same. I know the stores take a cut but my guess would be that it's easier to make people buy there than make them a direct donation for example.

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Here is an old (2016) breakdown of their income sources: https://krita.org/en/item/funding-kritas-development/

I follow their updates semi-regularly so I'm not sure if they made a more recent one that was as detailed. I found a tad depressing to see how much Steam purchases are making compared to donations.

They also had an interesting post about the fact that on the Windows store they cannot mention that you can download it for free as it is against Microsoft TOS: https://krita.org/en/item/krita-in-the-windows-store-an-upda...

They also mention that it's a compromise, it's adding a new income stream but participating in the economy of non-free software.

It's hard to make money with free software, even if your product is industry-level in some aspects.

If Microsoft asked you to make a donation for a product, you'd probably also scoff at the idea.

It is a term that carries lots of connotations, and people are far less likely to do than simply buy a product.

We didn't do an update on that, because that post got us into big trouble with inland revenue (Dutch) in 2017...

Right, I remember the issue... which I think got you to do the proper setup of the Krita foundation to avoid any similar issue (which may have been quite some work and accountant fees).

Thank you for your work, by the way. Krita is one of the things that make me the happiest, with Linux itself. It's such a well-designed software, and it's such a pleasure to paint with it.

> I found a tad depressing to see how much Steam purchases are making compared to donations.

Why's this depressing? They 'charge' a reasonable price on Steam for those who want to either support the project or get automatic updates or both, and the developers for this open source project get funded without having to actually paywall the product. Seems pretty good all around to me!

I think it's the same situation with companies paying for software from a company they already have a spending relationship with instead of trying the competition. You lose a lot of people when you ask them to get their card out for yet another entity. It's easier to buy into the nth AWS tool, or Office 365 app, or Steam game than to take a chance with some new person's grasp on security and privacy.

I was using it generally before but bought it on steam 1) to support the project and 2) to have it automatically update itself.

Worth what I paid for it even though I could get it free.

It reminds me a lot of Aseprite, which is free to compile yourself since it's open source, but you have to buy it on Steam for auto-updates and such.

Aseprite calls itself "source available" now. Their license has a "no redistribute" clause, so if want to use it and can't compile it yourself, you have to buy it.

I spent about an hour trying to compile it on Windows a few months ago, couldn't get it working. Can't remember why, maybe most of that time was installing requirements.

Seems like a bit of a perverse incentive.

They were GPLv2 for a while but changed course. I'd use the fork going forward:

https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite

From memory, one of their dependencies (maybe skia?) was a gigantic pain to build. I also wasn't very familiar with ninja, and couldn't debug some of the ninja output from cmake.

Doesn't really matter because I already had a license, but it would have been interesting to play around with the internals.

I know Paint.NET, WinSCP and HexChat does this (Microsoft Store).

Paint.net stopped releasing source code in 2009.

But you can still download it from their website for free. They charge for it on the windows store.

Spoiler warning, all .NET programs can be decompiled. This includes many Unity games.

Decompilation is not the same as source availability. Any binary can be converted into source that will compile back into a (nearly) equivalent binary. Whether that source code is economically viable to use in some derivative work is an entirely different question. It might be easier for .NET binaries to be decompiled but the point still remains that machine generated source code is not the same as human generated source code.

There is a colossal difference between attempting to decompile a native binary (using a tool like Ghidra) and decompiling a .NET binary. .NET binaries contain all the information necessary to express the original program, except for local variable names.

You are left with something highly readable that will build correctly. Unlike native code disassemblies which need to guess at data types and stack usage.

What does the output source look like? Is it legible?

Would decompiling something like paint.net and attempting to compile the out source with Mono (for use on Linux) be a viable pursuit?

I am unfamiliar with the nuances of Mono vs Dotnet, particularly in graphical applications

Is there something like that on Linux that's gtk based but not as complicated as Gimp?

Drawing fits that description, but it isn't really comparable to Krita — the authors describe it as like MS Paint but for Gnome.

Pinta seems similar, but more Xfce-ish.

=> https://maoschanz.github.io/drawing/

=> https://www.pinta-project.com/

>You don't get anything extra apart from the automatic updates

I would pay to not have autoupdates, figuratively speaking.

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