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Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

demandrush.com

421–430 of 473 posts

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#421
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 4chan thread is pretty illustrative of Gimp's UI shortcomings: http://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/60884056

Oh wow. No wonder my mom switched from trying linux back to windows after I tried to tell her "you can just use gimp for basic Photoshop stuff" It doesn't even have a circle tool and the best "solution" seems to be ellipse select with shift -> fill -> shrink selection -> delete What a dystopian ux nightmare. Sorry Mom, for inadvertently inflicting gimp on you.

Er, no. The best solution is to use the circle (select) tool, convert the selection to path, then stroke the path.

I don't think it's that far from how one goes about drawing bezier paths in PS (although it is a little more convoluted).

https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/28344/how-...

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#422
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and if you're building on Gimp you're WAY past "from scratch". The bulk of it is already there. This could be a good thing or a bad thing if major changes are needed. A project of GIMP's size is a big ship to steer.

There is a neat feature of large fundraiser campaigns in free software you can take advantage of, in that if you do get 400k and hire 5 devs and have them work a year on a wide range of features for some software, it doesn't really matter what upstream says if the users want those features. You just fork if upstream isn't "on board", work on your own separate branch for a year, and then when all the users start downl…

Surely the big problem with this (and the wider site concept, much as I generally favour it) is that the donating users who say they also want GIMP to be as good as Photoshop don't all have the same idea about what constitutes better UX. So you get a high proportion of dropouts from the funding subscription, as well as disagreements with GIMP's existing user base and team about whether they forget their original roadmap in favour of merging your patch, assuming you can still afford to finish it.

(Key difference with Kickstarter etc is that people are pledging for a specific solution rather that for people to solve a problem, and the cash is paid up front rather than a promised monthly commitment. And still there are issues with execution of many projects, particularly once third parties with different goals are involved. "I also need GIMP to be as Photoshop" on the other hand, is basically asking for a "nice unicorn" and hoping both that unicorns can exist and that everybody else involved - especially the unicorn-breeder - shares your definition of "nice" ones)

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#424
post #52

Photoshop license costs $348 a year. If 1000 people get together and put $400 each, you'll get $400000. That money could be used to leverage a Gimp to be more Photoshop-users friendly. Then you don't have to keep with the subscription model. You have a great piece of open source software available for everyone to use as long as they want. You can do another round to get more features added. This solves the issue that…

Note to OP.

1) You need a 3rd button for each submission that says "Already Solved". People can post links to SaaS products that already solve the exact problem the users are posting...

Example: Following 2 Submission have several products that solve the exact same problem.

- Gamify budgeting so I save more money => https://www.demandrush.com/problems/gamified-savings-app

- Community chat on my website => https://www.demandrush.com/problems/onsite-community-chat

2) You also should introduce some sort of flagging or curation, because quite a few "Problems" read like 1 off specific requests, and some descriptions are also really vague and too broad

3) Might also wanna provide Upvote (only, and no downvote, like ProductHunt and Facebook "Likes" :) button to assess popularity, because not everyone might be mentally willing to commit to monthly payments, but might really "like" the idea and think it deserves to be solved.

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I think copyleft licenses offer a solution here: if you are worried that corporations (or rival corporations) might monetize your product (or derive any profit from it indirectly), licensing it under a copyleft license would make their lives very, very hard. It's near impossible, for instance, to keep an AGPLv3-licensed product within a walled-garden, hence good luck while trying to build a *AAS on that.

The issue is not to deprive corporations of profit. Profit is good. The issue is how they behave with the profit once they get it. They lock it up in the hands of the very few rather than distributing it far and wide so good stuff can get done all over the world. The concentration of capital or the good is the problem. The more it is concentrated, the more good that gets done is on the terms of the corporations rathe…

Who is profit good for?

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not to deprive corporations of profit. Profit is good. The issue is how they behave with the profit once they get it. They lock it up in the hands of the very few rather than distributing it far and wide so good stuff can get done all over the world. The concentration of capital or the good is the problem. The more it is concentrated, the more good that gets done is on the terms of the corporations rathe…

Who is profit good for?

For everyone. Who is profit not good for? Someone has chosen to pay the company for the good, that's their decision to do so. The company has provided the good. The consumer is better off because of it. And he or she has paid for the good. So yeah it's good for everyone.

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$400k pays for 3 people.. maybe a couple of more if you hire from a cheaper country. If all GIMP needed was a few more developers to be competitive against PS, that would have happened by now. You're seriously underestimating the amount of work GIMP needs to do.. and/or the amount of work that already goes into GIMP.

Oh but it is? Do you use the GIMP? Photoshop's content-aware fill first appeared as a third-party open-source plugin for the GIMP. While one certainly can't equate the two I have found GIMP works well for a broad array of digital imagery tasks... just like Photoshop. Much of Photoshop's dominance has to do with the network effects of Adobe's ubiquitous ecosystem as much as the comprehensiveness of their tooling.

Last time I tried the lack of Adjustment Layers and Smart Objects was a dealbreaker for me. Maybe that's changed but those are things I use daily (I can deal with lack of content-aware fill).

Re: Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project

#430
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is a lot of those "altruistic purposes" tend not to be so altruistic, when you look into why they do them. Take for example, when Google recently chose to donate a bunch of hardware to schools instead of giving their employees an annual gift. Google gifted schools Chromebooks, which seems like an incredible act of charity. Except for the fact that you have to pay a subscription to Google to use them. Whic…

> Google gifted schools Chromebooks, which seems like an incredible act of charity. Except for the fact that you have to pay a subscription to Google to use them. Do you happen to have a reference for this? G suite for education is free as far as I know and I wasn't able to find anything else that you might be referring to.

Check out this page for a start on Chrome device licenses: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/2717664?hl=en

You can see an educational portal listing the cost of the management license at $30 here, which isn't really a complete picture, but demonstrates that we aren't talking about something they give schools for free: https://edu.google.com/products/devices/

Note that this is kinda of well-hidden, but that last link cites the "total cost of ownership" of a $149 Chromebook over three years as $588, which should give you an idea the difference between the hardware they give away, and the eventual cost of everything you need to deploy the suckers.

Schools is definitely big money for Google, it's just well-disguised as an altruistic endeavor.

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