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Comment by teleforce | Hacker News Reader

> Congrats to the GIMP team, can't imagine the catharsis they will experience when 3.0 officially drops.

Thanks for the catharsis word, I have to look it up for the meaning.

20 years or equivalent to 5 times Olympics games, is a very long time to develop and improve a software. It's now comparable to the real-time Linux kernel, another open-source software albeit it's a kernel not a user application [1].

Any other open-source software that has a comparable development time that I'm not aware of? But as the old adage says it is better to be a tortoise than a hare, as long you're winning the game.

[1] 20 years later, real-time Linux makes it to the kernel:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41584907

[2] The Tortoise and the Hare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare

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>Any other open-source software that has a comparable development time that I'm not aware of?

GNOME famously had that file picker thumbnail issue open for 18 years.

https://www.omglinux.com/gnome-thumbnails-file-picker/

Blender started ad in-house 3d modeling back in 1994, was open sourced in 2002, and continues with very active and sustainable development today. I used it most 2010-2012, and it has been incredible to see how much has happened since then.

https://www.blender.org/about/history/

What's been added since then?

I remember Blender back then. The days of watching squares slowly render over 2-7 minutes each for some cool project I made with lighting.

Has much new been added to editing/functionality or just speed optimisations?

A vast, vast array of features. Multiple new renderers, material systems (lumping node systems into this), 2D animation systems (mostly via grease pencil AIUI), video compositing features, sculpting (I think is new since then?)

I mean, even if you aren't using it now, it's probably worth looking at e.g. the latest release notes https://www.blender.org/download/releases/4-3/ just to see the array of things improving and adding onto stuff that mostly didn't exist 12 years ago.

Being old grows ecosystem. Lits of progress in N64 decompilation, & behind that is https://github.com/Fast-64/fast64 for using blender in romhack development

Since no other pedants have chimed in yet, I'm required to point out that 20 years is five olympiads, which is the timespan in between six Olympic games.

> Any other open-source software that has a comparable development time that I'm not aware of?

Emacs. Free and open source. User software. 40 (50) years in development. Mythical

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