Live data from Hacker News

Krita fund has no corporate support

fund.krita.org

151–160 of 223 posts

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#151
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of businesses that are great for a small shop and will make a lot of money, but they have no potential to grow larger. Those businesses are not a domestic replica of some efficient international option as there never will be an international option. If you to become a billionaire you have to start one of those international businesses, but if you are content with a million you can get that on a much s…

> lot of businesses that are great for a small shop and will make a lot of money, but they have no potential to grow larger You’re describing businesses without economies of scale. They can compete simply by being local.

Scale seems relative here, no? Scaling to serve a few nearby countries is still some sort of scale, just not worldwide scale.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#152
post #52

Krita is also sold as a paid version (store version [0]) for a one time fee (never goes on sale). So unlike most open source projects it might have a more steady income already. I don't know anything about their sales numbers but according to SteamSpy they are in the 100-200k range [1] and that's one store only not counting MS and Epic. I was actually arguing for a long time that more open source projects should do t…

Krita is also evidence that this model can work in some limited instances even though the program is completely monetarily free in every sense of the word. It's not "free after X months", it's not "free but you pay for premium features" -- it's just a free download, but you can buy it in a store. There are only two reasons to buy Krita through Steam:

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.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#153
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://krita.org/en/item/intel-becomes-first-krita-developm... maybe that has ended

No, it's still actual, but they don't have a listing the fund.krita.org database because they sponsored us directly.

Minor suggestion: I understand that for organizational purposes and clarity it might make sense to have them separate, but I suspect merging those stats together on this page might be better for the project overall?

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.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#154

I like Krita's development ethos, but I really can't use the product at all. If I want software that doesn't respect my intentions, but provides the kitchen sink for functionality, I can find that better represented and supported in Adobe, Paint.Net, Paint Tool Sai; and those are just the raster comparisons. I honestly can't wait until design tools figure out what year it is and start developing blue-sky versions tha…

>to provide honed experiences for specific project work

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.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#155

This type of software is an excellent fit for "eventually open" licenses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459492 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 yea…

Another approach is to allow free non-commercial use, and to charge for commercial licenses. There are licenses that grant all the rights that non-commercial users want, but still require businesses to pay. https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/ https://prosperitylicense.com/

The PolyForm Project also has other licenses. For example, the PolyForm Small Business License allows free use in organizations with fewer than 100 individuals and less than 1,000,000 USD in annual revenue.

https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#156

I'm migrating from Krita to Photoshop lately. 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 d…

Not to detract from raincole's point, and this is not relevant at all to their problem, but just a general reminder that in many ways Krita is not a direct competitor to Photoshop unless you're using Photoshop as a digital painting tool -- and if you are, I would argue that Krita is arguably a better product in multiple ways.

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.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's no longer open source, and offers no protection to the users against lock in. All it takes is some change of leadership or VC funding and the permissive license will be abandoned in favor of a proprietary revenue-maximizing model. Human nature and all. 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 dev…

Both the PolyForm Noncommercial License and the Prosperity Public License are irrevocable. There is no lock-in. Everyone gets the code, just like with an OSI-approved "open source" license. 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.

They are irrevocable, but they also disallow commercial redistribution of modified copies - in perpetuity.

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.

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#158
post #2

That's just sad. Open Source support really needs to be normalized in corporate environment. Now it's more of an exception than the rule.

> Open Source support really needs to be normalized in corporate environment It won't. The only real workaround right now is to simultaneously launch SaaS alongside the FOSS project and monetize that heavily.

> 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)

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#159
post #67

I want someone to build this: 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…

thanks.dev does this. I think I saw GitHub Sponsors also started (or will start?) doing something like this, but I'm not sure on the details off-hand. 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 ha…

See also https://stackaid.us as another platform doing similar

Re: Krita fund has no corporate support

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Contact us for a quote" Any idea how much that is?

According to web.archive.org they had their 'starter' subscription priced at $30,000/year for 50 developers as of December 18th, 2022.

Whoa, that's very likely way more than what these organizations spend supporting OSS, lol.
Post reply on HN