Krita fund has no corporate support
fund.krita.org
fund.krita.org
SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) are slowly becoming ubiquitus around the world due to regulation.
I want to be able to aggregate all SBOMs within my company, have a small tool that scans my machine and creates a SBOM for all Open Source tools I use (e.g. Firefox, VLC etc.), uploads that to my corporate registry.
This data is then submitted to a donation aggregator which analyzes those SBOMs and distributes my monthly donation across all those projects.
It is so hard dealing with those individual donor portals and various forms to donate to foundations et. al.
If this whole project could be run as a non-profit foundation itself that'd be perfect.
CISA has been pushing it, which his my why it's on my radar: https://www.cisa.gov/sbom
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/digital-health-center-ex...
The US government has added SBOMs to a proposed rule to update the Federal Acquisition Regulation. So if you want to sell to the US Government you'll have to provide SBOMs: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/03/2023-21...
Lots of large companies require SBOMs from their supplier.
In the EU we will get the Cyber Resilience Act which will make them mandatory as well in certain cases: https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12536-2023-...
And yes, there's bascially two technical standards to provide them: SPDX and CycloneDX: https://cyclonedx.org/
Found that there is a Krita on liberapay, which i much prefer as platform, but who knows if that's official or not, since it's not linked on this thread's link.
Many of those software projects available even for commercial systems like Windows and Mac OS, and of course the various free software environments. Those users are all equally important, so there's no conflict there.
Any idea how much that is?
2) Write up what you want, and email ALL the companies you want a quote from... CCing them all in the same email.
Make sure to indicate a close date for them "and all other possible bidders" to submit by.
Now they all know who their competitors are, AND, they know there could be other, extra competitors, AND they know to price as competitively as possible.
The sales people at the other end, and the company, will know if they want to "waste their time or not".
This works well with car dealers too. If you want the best price on a specific make and model with specific options, send to the 10 dealers in a 2 hour drive radius.
Seems kind of selfish, does it not?
Maybe if I'm some big bulk buyer and think I can get a better deal by talking to the salesguy then I'll do that. But if I'm some small fry buying like 1 or 2 of the things I know they aren't going to give me a break, but I still have to go through the "contact the sales person, they call you back, you explain what you want, they generate a quote within 5-7 business days that is good for 30 days after being generated, you end up not buying the thing for whatever reason" rigamarole.
Sidenote: I've never had a vendor balk at me using an "expired" quote to buy something. Our purchasing process never proceeds within 30 days, but turns out the prices don't change either. It is very common to be executing on a quote that's 6 months old.
This is setting off all of my "enterprise trash software" alarms. And if there is one thing those all have in common, it's being way too expensive.
They used to be simple to understand, looking at their homepage today I have no idea what they are doing today but not what I'm looking for.
But yeah, I've argued for this a long time as well: who is going to look up 100 to 2,000 dependencies and see if they accept donations and set that up and cancel when you stop using it, add new ones when you start using them (and many will be transitive deps, so you have to check if it changed every month or something), etc. etc.
You just want to give one organisation $500/month or whatever and let them sort it out. You don't even need SBOMs, just start by sending them your go.mod or package.json or Cargo.toml or Gemfile or whatever.
That the FSF and OSI are doing basically nothing in this regard is why I have trouble taking either organisation serious.
Just sending go.mod etc. only looks at the software in the build process which doesn't go far enough.
But I think we're on the same page!
How do I do that today? I collect a list of that software and contact hundreds of individual people and organizations, figure out the donation processes, fill out forms, transfer money etc.
I want this to be automated. I want this automation to build upon existing standards.
Does that help?
Part of what makes FOSS work at all is that the motivation is not profit but benefit.
I have plans to expand/plug this into a donation aggregator platform like you mentioned if time permits. But if there is an existing effort for the same, I am happy to contribute. :)
If you can also hook into an accounting system (eg plaintextaccounting.org) then you could also calculate the whole dollar amounts to donate as some percentage of income from the product.
Then your boss will come and ask WTF do you use VLC for when all the videos are on the web, also some default media player comes with your OS and by the way, you are not supposed to watch videos during your work day.
I got flashbacks from my tiny startup days when corporate went to procurement companies which wanted specific terms and mode of payment. And after all the infrastructure was in place... they basically spent no money!
The SBOM idea exists in various forms. Few need it and few use it.
If somebody wants to pay money, they will figure out a way. If they want to invent an excuse they will find one.
Not taking it the wrong way, you're right :)
> I got flashbacks from my tiny startup days when corporate went to procurement companies which wanted specific terms and mode of payment. And after all the infrastructure was in place... they basically spent no money!
Yep, that's painful but I count it as the cost of doing business. If I jump through these hoops and my competition doesn't it sets me apart. If only 1 in 10 then spent money so be it.
> The SBOM idea exists in various forms. Few need it and few use it.
True today. Not true tomorrow. Software development will become a highly regulated industry. This is my prediction at least.
> If somebody wants to pay money, they will figure out a way. If they want to invent an excuse they will find one.
I want to give them fewer excuses.
I think this is just not true. Reducing friction will increase participation.
I make donations to many organizations currently. I would donate to more, but it's a hassle to identify them and determine what/how I want to donate. It's just not a top priority for me, for better or worse. But if I could click a button right now and 5x my donations with the trust that they were supporting what I wanted them to, I'd do it!
edit: Also, this is a reminder to me that everything is a choice and I could be spending my time setting up donations instead of commenting on HN...
Funds are then distributed based on usage (trackable at the package registry).
The idea being corporates buy a single license per head, rather than dealing with lots of donations etc.
Probably lots of reasons it wouldn't work, but it's a fun thought experiment.
https://mozilla.github.io/cargo-vet/
Adding a "pay upstream" feature to it would probably be minimal incremental effort. Someone is already supposed to pay the third-party auditors, after all.
That is to say, I don't think a pure "frequency of use" metric is sufficient to fairly distribute such a pool. And if you have a large and growing pool of available money then the incentive to game the distribution scheme becomes more attractive than making truly awesome software. And I very much doubt that we have any reliable ways of aligning such a money distribution scheme with the goal of creating amazing software.
EDIT: I may be missing part of the point
Since you are the one marking the dependency of LegitimatelyUsefulLibrary on your PadLeft projects, you can game the metrics however you’d like when making it.
You pick a % to keep and a % to pass along to each of your your dependencies, and then they split up that % that you passed along to them, so on and so forth.
Of course people could choose to pass 0% along to their dependencies. But that seems fine; people can adjust and just not send greedy projects a very big split.
Trying to enforce some fairness on the outside will probably just result in silly behavior from greedy people (ie, if every project gets an equal split out and somebody doesn’t want to hand any money down to their dependencies, then they can just create a bunch of tiny projects to dilute their out-split).
Trickle down economics? Ronald, is that you?
We can work on improving things later.
All of your engineers get 5,10 votes for important libraries they use. The vote history is aggregated, and voting is twice a year. For every N votes we send $100 to that project. That way you’re not cutting little checks, and you have a finite number of projects you have to hunt down funding contacts and charitable status for.
Due to aggregation across votes, all the projects that perpetually come in 10th to 20th place get paid every year or two, and first place is likely to see a little more money each year. $300 in June and $400 in December for instance.
A round is currently active and dependencies are encouraged to sign up. Quite literally millions worth of crypto up for grabs for the ecosystem's dependencies on a recurring basis. Frequency is about twice per year right now but I think the goal is to get to at least once per quarter.
(Disclaimer: I work for a company called OP Labs which does work for the Optimism Collective)
(And yes, it's a crypto project, but I'm hoping the common goal of constructing systems that can sustainably fund open source software might bridge the HN gap)
Thank You!
People who only use a tool occasionally are the ones using Paint.net, Krita, Inkspace, Audacity, etc. Part of that is to save money, but a much bigger part is that it's too much hassle to go through procurement when it isn't absolutely necessary. More hours would be spent paying for the tool then would be spent using it.
That makes it a hard sell to get corporate donations. From the corporate perspective, the tool is completely off their radar because their employees are using it to intentionally bypass corporate bureaucracy.
If something is priced cheaply enough to be paid for out of pocket by an "individual contributor," but for a work purpose, that's a big deal.
The bigger takeaway is that all seemingly B2B software is still B2C in disguise.
On the other hand, the kind, smart people making Krita aren't in it to run a sales pipeline. Like even if the diehard, nonparticipating libertarian rationalists are right, if it's true that every person on Earth would happily be a billionaire, most people think sales isn't fun or meaningful.
If you want to make the world more meaningful in your own way, I appreciate that the limit of fundraising to that goal is donations.
Don't get me wrong, I love Krita. I used it for years and I wrote ~30+ bug reports. It's a positive thing -- I won't bother reporting bugs to Adobe cause I know they don't care, unlike Krita devs.
However every time I need to collaborate with someone else, they use Photoshop. They use .psd like it's an interchangeable format[1]. Out of 10+ artists I've only seen one who doesn't use PS, and it's not Krita.
[1]: I know Krita can read and write .psd.
If it means one that everyone uses then none.
Even if you simply import a .psd and re-export it again as-is, it will still break things like smart objects and layer blending options.
It's not Krita's fault: .psd is not an interchangeable format. Implementing .psd support perfectly is basically implementing the whole PS itself. It's all the artists' "fault". But it doesn't change the fact that using Krita makes my days difficult.
I've once seen a .psd that won't display correctly in neither Ps or CSP, supposedly because it was exported from something else. That didn't seem like a fun situation.
It’s a 30+ year old format that went to multiple transitions. I don’t envy the poor soul that has to reverse engineer it.
This one? https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3a6d609dd72b8493e52a68f31...
https://github.com/gco/xee/commit/750196023da5457d9535b30299...
Or maybe the huge goliath that gives less than 0 shits about interoperability makes it difficult?
I'm not saying it's not a great app (I'm not familiar with it enough to judge it). But if I'm not using an open source one, I'd use the industry standard one.
Last time they had a sale on their "Universal" bundle, which got you Mac, Windows and iPad licenses for all their products for $100, I had just received some illustrator files that I wanted to work with on my desktop and decided to go ahead and pick that up.
I now find myself using Photo and Designer instead of Krita/Gimp and Inkscape, because I'm more efficient with it as a non-expert user and because the .psd and .ai interop is better.
I need to deal with one of those two file types approximately 0.75 times a month, so the industry standard one feels eye-wateringly expensive. But a one-time $100 fee for a less frustrating experience than the open source ones offered felt worthwhile to me. And they've grown on me to the point that I pick them up when I need to make something for a game jam, not just when I need the interop.
There's a handful of other programs that one or two of my friends use but absolutely zero of my friends have talked about using Affinity Photo.
M$ Windows, Photoshop, each company gets locked into their own CAD nightmare.
On the flip slide, we have Blender, Linux Server, (enough)SQL, Git, Stable Diffusion, and maybe python/python libraries if that counts.
The most surprising thing is how little professional people get paid, again compared to web dev.
They pay less because they can - there are many more highly motivated people who dream of making video games than there are open spots.
People are less highly motivated who dream about making Another Corporate CRUD App 2.0 (this time with Firefox support), and there are a lot more job openings.
If I had had the same level of understanding of economics as I do now, I probably would have stayed in web backend development.
The phenomenon of open source tools being able to even be considered by professional development is a very recent phenomenon (in the grand scheme of things). But for programmers it's still difficult because console support is so important and still extremely closed down.
It would be really cool to have some kind of open source community that developed these kinds of "usage specific" plugins across multiple open-source projects, to kind of patch in that functionality where it's missing. Some people to work on ever-evolving interfaces for the supported applications, and then some other people to write plugins that provided these features, progressively enhanced, based on those interfaces.
It would be a gargantuan effort, though, and you would just end up with a plugin soup without careful moderation (even more effort; and easy to go awry!) so c'est la vie!
And even if it is, rendering text just like Photoshop is just a tiny step towards rendering everything like Photoshop.
I think that Photoshop is an image manipulator first and foremost, and Krita is a tool for drawing/painting and maybe doing some light traditional animation (although even that is not its primary focus).
I think that CSP, Procreate, etc... are more direct competitors to Krita. Photoshop is a competitor to Gimp.
Again, does not change anything about raincole's comment, and I don't think that raincole was suggesting that they were direct competitors. It's just that whenever Photosohp and Krita get mentioned in the same sentence I feel like the assumption from many readers is that they're trying to do the same things, and I would personally say that I think they're separate categories of software. There are things that Photosohp does that Krita doesn't want to do and will probably never support, because it's a painting app, not an image manipulation app.
Krita: A new brush engine. A new file format for brushes. Some animation features that I don't use. New text system.
PS: AI-based object selection. AI-based neural filter. AI-based generative fill. New Javascript API for plugins.
It's quite clear that Adobe doesn't see PS as a digital painting app, but an (AI-assisted) image manipulation app.
I switched because it seems like it's important to use and support open source tools wherever possible, proprietary software is feeling more and more hostile to the user. I'm redirecting the money I was spending on Adobe products to open source donations.
I was actually arguing for a long time that more open source projects should do the same. Be on digital stores and sell the application for a one time fee.
1. You want to support Krita
2. You want Steam to handle updating/launching
And it turns out that's enough for them to get some sales. People underestimate how often users will either take the path of least resistance or purchase something just to be nice. Typically when we run into this kind of behavior it's negative, for example the struggle to try and get ordinary people to install ad blockers. But it's nice with Krita to see that human instinct more positively leveraged.
maybe that has ended
I suspect (but don't have evidence for this) that sponsorship tends to snowball -- corporations become more likely to sponsor products that are already being sponsored; and the harm from users thinking that the project has "enough" funding might be outweighed from the benefits of users and orgs thinking, "it's normal to sponsor Krita, we're not doing something weird or experimental by jumping on the bandwagon."
Again, just an instinct though, I could be wrong, and I get that this page being part of a larger existing funding platform might make including direct sponsors more contentious or inappropriate.
As a software engineer I understand what you are saying, but it is incredibly misleading then.
This way, corporations and business users can pay to get the latest version and features just like commercial software, while the hobbyist community still gets a relative recent and feature-full release they can use for free, has source available and is guaranteed to become fully GPL code in 3-5 years.
The traditional open source economic models (support and customization, services etc.) simply do not work for professional software with a large number of non-programmer users. A commercial license would allow these clients to pull resources together to allow software to be written, and eventually released as open source for the benefit of all - and they are the most interested in this because they don't want to get locked in.
https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/ https://prosperitylicense.com/
What is needed is a non-repudiable commitment from the vendor that the software will be fully open source, and a business incentive for them to continue developing the commercial version; they have a few years to monetize any new features, and to continue making money they need to continue bugfixing and creating other desirable new features, as opposed to just milking the lock-in cow.
Dual commercial/non-commercial licensing like this is a simple way to require commercial users to fund the further development and maintenance of the software.
This means that when the original vendor changes new versions of the software to a draconic proprietary license (as is their right as the full owner of the copyright), the community can't fork an older version and keep it up to date and distribute that; they can just use older versions until they become obsolete, incompatible, accumulate security holes etc. They are locked in to the vendor is they need those same features going forward.
Both commercial and non-commercial users can copy, modify, and redistribute modified and unmodified copies. Again, there is no lock-in.
There's little incentive for the developers to switch from dual commercial/non-commercial licensing of the source code to only distributing compiled executables. The whole point of choosing the dual licensing model is that it's more attractive to customers. You wouldn't want to use such a model if you were trying to keep trade secrets, but in such a case you wouldn't consider using an open source license either.
Further reading:
https://duallicensing.com/ https://indieopensource.com/public-private/indies
I don't follow. Both examples you provided explicitly forbid commercial redistribution:
The Prosperity Public License 3.0.0
license allows you to use *and share this software for noncommercial purposes for free* and to try this software for commercial purposes for thirty days
[no other distribution allowances are made in the rest of the license]
PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0
Your license to distribute covers distributing the software with changes and new works permitted by *Changes and New Works License*.
Changes and New Works License: The licensor grants you an additional copyright license to make changes and new works based on the software *for any permitted purpose*.
[Complete list of permitted purposes]
"Any noncommercial purpose" ; "Personal use ... without any anticipated commercial application"; "Noncommercial Organizations"
When I say dual licensing, I am referring to the business model of offering software for free under a non-commercial license, and charging for commercial usage rights. Kyle E. Mitchell calls this Free-and-Paid Dual Licensing.
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2023/09/10/Two-Kinds-Dual-Lic...
To use such a business model you also need a commercial license. There's no one-size-fits-all solution, and it's normally something that requires input from a legal professional. Kyle has made a couple of recent efforts to improve things.
https://fastpathlicense.com/ https://commercial.polyformproject.org/
At least, I haven't seen the authors give their blessing to a fork of the old version of their software, beyond the text of the license itself. Maybe it hasn't been long enough, but it soon should be.
Perhaps you approach this a bit too dogmatically. The objective for me as a user is to have good quality software, with source available, in a competitive market that does not lock me in - because it allows other free or commercial spin-offs with low entry barriers.
If we can't ever accept something that does not pass the Stallman purity test - even if it means open source programmers in some niches should starve - what we end up in those niches is binary blobs filled with spyware. And due to network effects (see the above .PSD discussion), we soon find ourselves forced to swallow the blob because it's the only real option.
Demand from the corporate entities proceed to dominate rather than voices from individual donations. Its a double edged sword.
It's hard for businesses hyperfocused on short-term gains to understand a long-term value of, for example, supporting an alternative for an industry-dominating Adobe toolkit. But the value is there.
Not only that they use privative products - it's that people think about Krita as an alternative to Photoshop, as Krita is intended for digital painting rather than general raster image manipulation. Hence narrowing the target of Krita to a much smaller audience.
Assuming a product that advertises its lack of corporate support won’t be super welcoming of commercial users.
So they mostly only import (Krita-exported) PSD into Ps, or even if Krita was used professionally on the floor by employed artists, choice of tools would be up to artist's discretion and might not become a corporate talking point in the way, say, what Maya or Lightwave debate would be.
Maybe OnlyFans/Patreon could throw a million or two for couple years...? But Krita is not the first choice across the board, and creators on those platform don't seem too concerned with CSP/Procreate subscriptions, so that might be a difficult path too?
It won't. The only real workaround right now is to simultaneously launch SaaS alongside the FOSS project and monetize that heavily.
It can work. Paying for software is already a normal part of doing business, make this work to your advantage. For example:
- In the budgeting process just add a line item for the FOSS software you're using and put a number on it that's lower than the proprietary alternative. - If you're already using the software (like Krita in this case), tell whoever is in charge of the purse strings how much time, effort, and money the software has saved the company and ask them to make a one-off or recurring payment to the project that's lower than the alternative. You'll be surprised how often they say yes (as long as they can get a receipt)
Krita is supposedly part of the KDE project, which is committed to switching to wayland, but has 0 wayland support. In practice, that means that if you use other input devices they can have bugs that make it unusable.
So it's Linux story is weak. A very bad start for a KDE app...but at least maybe on Windows it works well.
Well the problem then is it does the classic blender thing of having non standard shortcuts and usage modes, except unlike blender it does so for literally no reason. Buttons in most of these programs, for certain classes of operations are standardized, and Krita just works differently for the fun of it. No justifications, just "spend a long time changing it if you want it different."
The icons are also incredibly ugly and people get defensive about them. The QT thememing is fine, but the actual icons for brushes and the like look amateurish at best and really brings down the cohesiveness of the program.
Certain tools are also abysmal to use. The text tool is a joke. Then you have certain operations being incredibly slow.
I have worked as a professional artist for years. People here really seem to be implying photoshop is the "big dog" in the space, but this simply isn't true. I see far more CSP users than Photoshop users and among my coworkers and haven't used photoshop for anything but some post processing for years. Krita then needs to compete with CSP, and Procreate (which has gotten huge recently.) To be frank, it doesn't. CSP works mediocorely with Wine but because the input problems don't exist that exist with Krita I have taken to using that on Linux ironically because I use KDE. Krita is basically a non option for me at this point and has me considering making a GPU accelerated open source drawing app instead of suffering this current atrocious landscape.
Truthfully, if someone has a lot of money to dump around, devoting a few full-time developers or dropping cash on https://github.com/OpenTabletDriver/OpenTabletDriver would probably go a long way towards encouraging Wayland adoption from artists.
As far as I can tell the issue is not that Wayland can't do tablet control on the same level as X11, it's that the tools built around those capabilities still seem immature. OpenTabletDriver looks very promising but seems to have limited device support, limited in no small part by what tablets the devs have access to (my Cintiq 32 is unlikely to get added any time soon because it is no longer being sold and was expensive and uncommon when it was on the market -- which probably means I should try to do it, but it's been tough to find the time).
The NVIDIA situation is also a problem, but there's nothing anyone can do about that other than yell at NVIDIA more.
----
> The text tool is a joke.
The text tool should see considerable improvement soon; the entire text engine got rewritten in the last release, the devs just only had time to get it to feature parity with the existing tools.
I've also found Krita to be unsatisfactory for drawing pixel art. Select the pixel art brush and set it to be 3px wide, then draw a rectangle with the rectangle tool. This creates a rectangle with inexplicably jagged edges (http://0x0.st/HWyi.jpg). Turn off sharpness for the brush and try again, it seems to work now but selecting the background color with the similar color selection tool will reveal that the jagged edges are still present but very faint (http://0x0.st/HWyz.jpg). All of this happens with a 3px brush but not a 2px brush. It's bizarre. I suppose most digital painters don't notice/care about this, but it's a deal breaker for me.
I dislike the Krita icons as well. I would like colorful icons so my eyes can scan them quickly but some halfwit designer got it in their head that all the icons should be monochrome and there doesn't seem to be any way I can choose or create other icon themes.
I really want to like Krita, but it just doesn't work with me. All I really want is "MS Paint but with layers" but that's evidently too much to ask on Linux. I've tried more than a dozen painting programs and they're all disappointing.
The exception is for pixel art, Aseprite works fine for me.
Example of it on Linux with a decent theme.
Is that 1 developer of $17k / month? (So a $204k annual salary?)
Or, does it mean 5 developers for $17k / month (i.e. a $40k annual salary?)
If it's the latter, I'm highly concerned.
Even in countries like India salaries like $60k USD (INR 50 lakh) has become a bare minimum for software engineers who are even the least bit talented...
For a really good software developer in India, you'd have to pay circa $180k USD (INR 1.5 cr), which is still a massive discount compared to the US, since in the US that person would probably make around $350k.
Where are they hiring people?
There are also definitely juniors in the US making $60k (and probably even less).
Since WFH became more common, high salaries have spread across the US. Several members of my team are earning $250k to $400k (depending on their level), and are scattered across the US, and many are living super-LCOL cities. For example, one guy (who makes over $350k) lives in Utah, and around the start of COVID he bought a large house with a lot land surrounding it, for (to him) a measly $270k.
> There are also definitely juniors in the US making $60k (and probably even less).
Nobody should be making that little in the US. $120k is the minimum for a software engineer in the US, regardless of location. If a SWE is earning less than six figures in the US, they're certainly being swindled.
I spend a lot of time on developing StreetComplete, got paid only for small part of that.
And I would be able to spend more time on that and willing even with relatively small funds.
I think that many people would be willing to take significant pay cut to work on project chosen by them.
> I think that many people would be willing to take significant pay cut to work on project chosen by them.
I definitely agree with this sentiment; I can relate to it strongly.
180k is top pay for a dev in most of America. 50-60k is entry-level pay for a dev in most of America. 350k is really uncommon outside of your bubble.
Are you really suggesting Indians make as much and even more? Then why are companies offshoring to them when they could just hire local juniors for the same price?
I've dealt with a contractor who hired such engineers. I remember the team, which I think had around 10 people (but I don't recall the exact size). There was 1 guy, who was basically a 10X engineer, and pulled the weight of most of his team/division. He wrote/delivered most of the working code, while there were around 9 others on his team who contributed very little (mostly terribly buggy code which he had to fix).
Yea, they were paying each person on the team $6k (the manager–who was pretty much useless -- was probably earning like $12k), and they were spending around $60k to $70k in total on this 10-person team. But–they could have pretty much just fired the entire team except for the one guy who was producing most of the code, and gotten the same (or better results). He would've been happier, and he wouldn't been dragged down by all those other nearly-non-contributing folks.
(For what it was worth, I talked to this guy (who was from Rajasthan), and suggested that he find a better job that paid better and valued his skills better. And I even offered to recommend him, and help him find a job abroad with a company that'd sponsor a visa for him; but he turned down my offer–he was actually, quite bizarrely, worried about some form of retaliation, if he left that contractor/team. It was strange indeed...)
Of course, if you want to find a software engineer in India who can actually deliver results (and communicate well in English), you should be willing to pay them at least $60k USD (INR 50 lakh) / year. Any less, and you'll basically "get what you pay for" unless you luck out and land some talented engineer who doesn't know his skills' worth.
Fwiw, $60k USD is still a quite cheaper than the US (a 50% discount), since I'd say in the US, the bare minimum for a software engineer today stands at around $120k USD.
US dev salaries have been completely skewed by stupid levels of VC money. European ones not so much.
It's interesting that Europe has abjectly failed to produce anything like Google or Meta. I'm not sure what the underlying reason for that is.
There isn't a singular reason, it's a complex combination. Btw I'd like to preface this to say I'm not sure most Europeans actually want a Google or a Meta, there is aversion to "too big to fail" companies in most sectors.
* investment money - VCs bet on tons of stupid things with the hope of some of them making it. Many a crappy business model has received hundreds of millions of investments to try and make it, and companies spend years chasing growth on the back of those investments without worrying about profitability. Investment in the EU is usually more conservative and grounded in reality - a business model of "we'll give it away at a loss for 10 years to get lots of market share and then increase prices to capture the market" simply won't fly here.
* "Europe" isn't a single market in most important senses of that word. Each EU country has it's own language (okay there's some overlap like Czech and Slovak, Belgium and France/Netherlands, Ireland and UK before Brexit, but generally), laws, regulations. A single business can't just immediately serve the whole of the EU without doing due diligence, translations, checking what regulations might apply for them, etc. That means that the size of the potential market is limited from the start without extra investment. A French startup can only sell in France until they figure out what is needed to sell in the Spanish market, translate websites/products, hire support people that speak Spanish, etc. etc. etc. There are tons of good quality decently successful European startups, but most stay within one or a few countries. Exceptions are purely digital companies such as Spotify who can afford to sell all around the world with relatively few hurdles.
* Regulations and common decency/fear - over here, a business model of "we'll fake sell medical devices" or "we'll trick people into giving us all their movements/desires/internet history and sell that to whoever wants it" will hardly fly. Not that there aren't unscrupulous people here, there are, but it'd be harder to get investment and talent to work for you.
* Better... I'm going to go with social safety net, but that's only a part of it. Over here, people are generally more content and know they have things to fall back on, including retirement. FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), "grind mindset", "hustle mindset" and similar are quite rare here. People prioritise other things than work, don't live to work, and don't measure themselves (only) on work. So hustling to hit big and become massive is much more rarely seen as a good or desired thing.
People often deride the EU for "lacking innovation", but IMO that's flat out wrong - those people use wrong measurements (lack of massive tech giants) to define innovation. There are tons of European startups and scaleups and mittelstands and b2b companies of all sizes that are successful and innovative. They're just not "infinite growth" global behemots, but.. do they need to be? Is that the thing that ultimately matters?
If their business has no economies of scale, no. If it does, they won’t survive without subsidies.
At a certain point, subsidising a low-scale domestic replica of an efficient international option breaks due to (a) the internet and consumer choice or (b) cost.
Software does lend itself to international options more than other fields as the upfront costs are high and ongoing costs are low. (compare to plumbers where you can start a company with a van and a fittings, but you have to pay the plumbers you hire every year - by the time you pay the plumbers and the office workers to schedule them there isn't much $ left over)
You’re describing businesses without economies of scale. They can compete simply by being local.
Not necessarily. Let's imagine a company that does budgeting and bank account centralisation, sold as a SaaS. A global company has to work on integrations with banks all around the world, data privacy regulations all around the world, translations including in right to left languages, fun stuff like UPI in India, cash payments to a machine in Japan, currency conversions etc. Meanwhile a Bulgarian startup in that space only needs to interface with the 15 local banks and use EU-mandated APIs that make their lives easier (all integrations are the same), and provide only one language, one currency. They don't need employees policies for 50 different countries, with local HR and legal departments/subcontractors everywhere. Not to mention layers of management to scale.
Do you still think the global company will have lower costs?
You're describing a system with economies of scale, up to a point, followed by negative economies of scale. That's my argument: this is a good business for a European company to dominate.
For a good example, Walmart failed miserably in Germany because they failed to understand the local market in any way. You can have a successful regional chain of supermarkets without it needing to become Walmart-scale. Just being local, having a strong local presence and understanding of the market, and having local costs can be a massive advantage. A Bulgarian startup has economies of local labour costs that can trump the economies of scale of Google. Spotify are quite successful even if their competitors (Apple, Google, Amazon) are massive. Not to mention there are big market segments where economies of scale across markets simply do not apply. Legalstart, a startup doing "law services online" for small and medium enterprises in France cannot apply pretty much anything to any other country due to the different legal systems. If there was some massive behemoth in that space globally, Legalstart still wouldn't have an "economies of scale" disadvantage.
This is correct. VC-backed companies aren’t leading base compensation gains.
And only if you pinch pennies (there's just a ~100 Euro margin here after unavoidable costs). The rule of thumb in Germany is that an employee is going to cost you roughly 1.7x their gross salary: that'd be wages of 1,700 Euro / month.
The latter is going to pay for 1/4th of a decent software developer - and even then you're better promising more than 30 paid vacation days among other benefits.
Basically: forget about it.
That said, I absolutely would take a significant pay cut to get to work on a project I cared about again. Golden handcuffs are not absolute.
I spend a lot of time on developing StreetComplete, got paid only for small part of that.
And I would be able to spend more time on that and willing even with relatively small funds.
I think that many people would be willing to take significant pay cut to work on project chosen by them.
For reference, 3000 €/month would be a low salary in Poland for a programmer but really good overall. I would take it if I would be paid for OpenStreetMap development.
I thought it was more of a tool for hobbyists?
Compare to "corel painter samples" where the 2nd thumbnail is a fairly impressive Audrey Hepburn rendition
Can't remember the last time I saw output of the style from the first search result being used to sell pretty much anything
LibreOffice nearly got a Tyson Tan mascot called Libbie the Cyber Oryx. She was silently eliminated from the initial round of votes, in favor of a bunch of half-assed attempts that included two barely modified Duolingo owls. This perceived slight of what had been assumed to be a democratic process caused such a dustup that LibreOffice decided it didn't want a mascot anymore.
https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2017/11/13/mascot...
That said, it's still a shame! Seems like there would be someone out there with similar interests. I hope this post, or whatever else, helps evangelize this as a problem!
For an example, Clip Studio Paint - a tool unabashedly designed for and advertised to comic artists - has a design concept of a 'comic panel'. This lets you drag out a panel, instead of an arbitrary shape that you will use AS a panel. The panel, also an arbitrary shape, comes with functionality like "bleed" which allows you to continue drawing outside of the panel, but will truncate that content when you de-select the panel. It includes concepts like "path rendered borders" so that you can do weird stuff with borders that you wouldn't want to do with an arbitrary shape (like have characters break through them).
So, you end up with a nice little feature that can ABSOLUTELY be recreated in other programs. Nothing in that "panel" feature couldn't be done with a series of steps and possibly some macros in other applications. The problem is, it's all of that setup (wasting my time) instead of just having the feature available because it's a well-known process with well-known problems. These are the people who are best suited to know what good processes look like, and can build the best kinds of tools for those well-known processes. Of course, they have to keep up to date, but that's any software in any industry.
Just to head off any assumption that I prefer CSP or something, I will say that they fall woefully behind on other stuff that is not comic related (understandable because of their history, but still a hindrance to me using it). That aside, a separate example is that every single drawing program should have the ability for you to move "tool settings" onto another device. No question. I should be able to work from my tablet, and pick colors on my phone. Or work from my desktop and change brushes or sizes or store values from one project, while I open the next desktop tab for a different project, all on my second screen. As far as I know, none of them do this.
The overall point being "We've designed apps to work with data like a computer uses that data. I would like it if we started designing apps that work with data however they have to in order for humans to work with 'concepts' in whichever way they understand those concepts (to the best of their ability, which is pretty able these days)."
You need someone to lead that charge first. And that someone needs to understand each format and likely pay some programmer for a long time to make and more importantly, polish, such a feature. Open source is notoriously weak at polishing, so payment seems inevitable to keeop interest.
When you are considering support for multiple devices you multiply said effort. Stylus vs touch screen controls are a different set of UX if you want it to be polished.