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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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