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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

GIMP is one of those things which make me wonder what GNU actually is. It's the GNU Image Manipulation Program, but it's very obviously dramatically and chronically understaffed. What about the GNU project is preventing them from putting more resources into their image editor?

This is not a criticism of the individuals who write code for GIMP.

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What about the GNU project is preventing them from putting more resources into their image editor?

The FSF, which manages the GNU project, doesn't really have any resources of their own to put into any of the GNU projects. Their role is almost entirely advocacy and some coordination, all actual development is done by volunteers. The GNU project has many many projects that are far more neglected than GIMP, and GIMP is probably on of their more active and well supported 'normal' end user applications.

But why? Why has the FSF neglected GNU, why has the FSF neglected themselves by not ensuring they have the funding necessary to manage a project of the scale and importance of GNU?

What part of "entirely volunteers" is not clear to you?

What part of "why" is not clear to you?

Why is money not falling from the skies? Well…

But why?

Mostly ideological I would guess. The sorts of people the were/are running the FSF didn't want to involve themselves with the sort of 'dirty' compromises needed to raise significant funds and end up beholden to large, almost certainly corporate, donors.

This is one of the main reasons why Free Software lost the 'war' to Open Source back in the day.

Because GNU are on a Mission. They’re not out to make things people want, they’re out to make things people ought to be wanting (according to them). This is not necessarily bad - the world needs some idealists - but it does interfere with fundraising.

this seems like a purposely malicious take on it. GNU people, and the people who develop the gimp, are on a mission to make things they WANT TO MAKE. How do you get the nerve to prescribe them as some form of missionaries that goes around telling people "you should want to modify your layers THIS way, simpleton" ?

And as far as free software, I think they generally think "people ought to care more about freedom for everyone, than closing stuff up"

It is a purposely malicious take! The question was why the GNU project has put itself in a place where it cannot assign resources to the GIMP project, to make GIMP more like what the average person wants it to be.

The GIMP developers say “we want our layers to work like this, take it or leave it”, and they have every right to do so. They write the code, they pay their own bills, they get to call the shots.

The GNU people say “software should be free-as-in-speech”. That is certainly their right, and to some extent I agree with them. However, that ideological stance means that the GNU project does not have any resources it can assign to the GIMP project (or anyone, for that matter).

Because the FSF is a software freedom advocacy group, they do not do software development. The FSF also doesn't "manage" the GNU project, which is a entirely volunteer project that is managed by it self (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-structure.en.html); they do provide critical infrastructure for both GNU and other projects but that is then manage by volunteers.

GNU hackers do what they want, when they want it, sometimes they get sponsored or backed by a company, but that is a rare thing ... question should be why aren't software development companies sponsoring developers to work on GIMP, GNU, and other free software projects?

"GNU" as in GNU-licensed program. It's not maintained directly by the Free Software Foundation.

You're just making this up aren't you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP#History

    The application subsequently formed part of the GNU software collection

And it's part of the list of "GNU Software" on this page: https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html (And no, that's not a list of all GPL-licensed software, it's a list of GNU software).

You're correct that it's not "maintained directly by the FSF", that's not how GNU operates, but I feel that GNU and the FSF has a responsibility for the health of the projects which are part of the GNU project.

https://www.gimp.org/develop/ says "historically part of the GNU Project".

I don't really know the current status or feelings of the GIMP developers, but I know GTK and GNOME have formally disassociated themselves from GNU, but it took them many years to get de-listed on that GNU packages page as Stallman flat-out refused to do so, as he believed that projects are unable to disassociate from GNU.

The GnuTLS people have had similar problems. It's still listed on that project page.

My point is: that page only reflects what Richard Stallman considers to be part of GNU, not what the developers of that project feel.

Well, https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html says it's currently a part of the GNU project.

It does not list GNOME or GTK, FWIW.

Yes, and like I said, it took the GTK/GNOME people years of complaining to get them removed, and the GnuTLS people still aren't removed after more than 10 years of complaining. LWN and other people documented the background on all of this to some extent, and if you're interested I think I have a text file with some link/details somewhere (which I can't seen to find momentarily).

So that list is worth bugger all for the purpose of this discussion.

No, it's worth quite a lot in this discussion, actually. It tells us that the GNU project considers GIMP part of the GNU project, regardless of what the GIMP project thinks. That means that the question "why does the GNU project not provide adequate resources to GIMP" is perfectly appropriate.

No matter what Stallman thinks, this kind of relationship is a two-way street. GNU or the FSF can't just unilaterally declare it to be "part of GNU" and then unilaterally "provide resources". Not only are they unlikely to do so if the relationship is adversarial, this sort of thing needs cooperation from the other side as well.

Either way, this is getting a little tiresome. I have explained there are disputes and complexities about what is or isn't a "GNU project" and I don't quite understand how anyone can deny that these disputes and complexities exist (regardless of how one might feel about them).

> What about the GNU project is preventing them from putting more resources into their image editor?

Does GNU or the FSF ever "put resources" towards a project? Last time I checked, almost all of the FSF's expenditures are towards advocacy. Aside from that they run some horribly outdated infra like that Savannah thing that many projects opt-out of because it's horrible.

Perhaps an inherent problem with defining yourself in terms of what you're not :)

Someone seriously has to tell me why all my comments in this tree are getting downvoted, it's a valid question is it not?

>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

To be fair to you, I think it's a valuable comment and the replies were insightful to me. Maybe your comment was being read as anti-Gimp (Gimp stories always get a lot of low-effort "Why hasn't Gimp done <x> yet??" comments). I love Gimp and I upvoted your comment because I've wondered similar things too -- just what is the relationship between GNU and GIMP?

That relationship seems to be a little confusing going by this thread, so I think your comment was warranted!

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