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GIMP receives a $100K donation

gimp.org

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Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#41

Post by Cthulhu_ »

"only" $100K - aren't we living in a world now where companies started in a garage make that amount of money ten times a second?

I haven't heard anything from e.g. Google or Facebook's open source funding endeavours. IMO every successful company should do their part and set aside a sizeable percentage of their revenue to paying and supporting open source projects and developers. It's wrong that e.g. the developer of cURL is (was?) struggling to make ends meet, when he (and the people behind gimp, etc) develops software used billions of times a day. That should make him hundreds of thousands a year.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#42

Post by dahart »

nothis wrote: post #5
darkwinx wrote: post #2

I hope that someday GIMP will have major change just like Krita & Blender. The UI of GIMP have received many complains.

I want to support GIMP but, especially for fast, professional use, the UI makes it impossible. Their raw features are on par with anything I'd want to do in Photoshop, it's 100% a UI issue at this point. And I don't get why it's this hard for open source projects to realize that (the only notable exception I know is Firefox, which I love).

> And I don’t get why it’s this hard for open source projects to realize that

I don’t know, but I’ll throw out my theory. Note I’m very much a fan of open source even though this might sound negative. I would also love to see GIMPs UI get an overhaul.

In short, I think it’s harder to prioritize open source features for multiple reasons.

When you don’t have paying customers, it’s very hard to prioritize the feedback you get. When you do have paying customers, you tend to prioritize in proportion to the account size, for better or worse. As a blanket general statement that is not always true, but more true than not, paying customers are trying to get something specific done for their job, while free customers are exploring. I say this from the point of view of owning a web startup with a freemium model, so I’ve had a lot of first hand requests from both paying and free customers. I haven’t had an OSS project with as much success, so there might be some different trends when all users are free users.

The other aspect is that developers of OSS projects have fewer deadlines and can choose what they work on. UI coding is usually less fun than writing filters or architecting an image cache. I know that personally, when I’m left to my own devices, I’m not usually working on the hard or boring things that would have the biggest impact for others, I’m working on the fun things that are most fun for me.

There’s also the issue that OSS projects are created by programmers for programming reasons, and they aren’t often able to hire designers and artists like a for-profit shop.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#43

Post by kaffeemitsahne »

rqs wrote: post #17

Create news, hope GIMP can use that money to work out a better and intuitive design. For example, currently, many Filters don't have previews (Or the preview window is too small), which make apply them become a slow try and error game. Also, the Text in the picture can be hard to select, as sometime you mistakenly select the underlying layer instead of the text. Also again, Filters cannot be directly applied to edita…

You can always submit bugs/annoyances/requests directly to the GIMP developers: https://www.gimp.org/bugs/

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#44

Post by [deleted] »

rqs wrote: post #17

Create news, hope GIMP can use that money to work out a better and intuitive design. For example, currently, many Filters don't have previews (Or the preview window is too small), which make apply them become a slow try and error game. Also, the Text in the picture can be hard to select, as sometime you mistakenly select the underlying layer instead of the text. Also again, Filters cannot be directly applied to edita…

[deleted]

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#45

Post by nothis »

ricardonunez wrote: post #30
nothis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's well-meaning but this is not the issue. It's not about "customization" or singular problems with a simple fix. It's about having a well-ordered, uncluttered, snappy GUI that never gets in the way. As a default. Until the GIMP team realizes that this isn't a separate issue but the central purpose of an image editing program, it will never be a serious option for professional work. They should invest those…

I agree with you until the hiring. The work that needs to be done is hard and hiring just one designer will not fix it. Maybe hiring one person to manage that part of the project. They need to pay an agency to do the work. The UX/UI needs major work and a lot of testing. That donation is good but the project will probably need more funding.

I definitely agree about the team size/cost. I have to say, it baffles me how much time programmers are willing to put into open source works but apparently it's impossible to find UI designers who are willing to do the same. I don't think it's a lack of enthusiasm, I think it's probably more of a social/clique thing and open source projects would benefit greatly from opening themselves up to contributers outside the realms of programming, signaling respect for that kind of work.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#46

Post by billyhoffman »

dzmien wrote: post #26
nothis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to support GIMP but, especially for fast, professional use, the UI makes it impossible. Their raw features are on par with anything I'd want to do in Photoshop, it's 100% a UI issue at this point. And I don't get why it's this hard for open source projects to realize that (the only notable exception I know is Firefox, which I love).

Well, given that it is open source software, have you ever considered contributing? I'm not trying to be dick. I know that just because you can spot flaws doesn't necessarily mean you know how to improve them, nor are you obligated to just because it is open source. But I bet you could offer some valuable feedback and/or ideas.

There is a tremendous amount of inertia that most be overcome to make changes to the UI.

I don't just mean technical inertia which is probably large given GIMP's size and long history, but also people inertia. UI tends to be the ultimate bikeshedding [1] blackhole. Few people have an opinion about how a denoising filter should be implemented. Several orders of magnitude more have feelings about the UI should look and the workflow should function.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#47

Post by enriquto »

nothis wrote: post #5
darkwinx wrote: post #2

I hope that someday GIMP will have major change just like Krita & Blender. The UI of GIMP have received many complains.

I want to support GIMP but, especially for fast, professional use, the UI makes it impossible. Their raw features are on par with anything I'd want to do in Photoshop, it's 100% a UI issue at this point. And I don't get why it's this hard for open source projects to realize that (the only notable exception I know is Firefox, which I love).

What is exactly the problem with gimp's UI? I find it intuitive and very easy to use (but then, I have not used many other interactive imaging programs). Is it missing something important? Has too many useless features?

GIMP's UI is alright for me, what I need are more features that are sorely lacking:

1) ability to work with images having an arbitrary number of spectral bands

2) floating-point pixel values

3) complex-valued pixels and their natural operations

4) images of arbitrary size, without need to open the whole image at once (which may not actually fit in memory)

5) save the processing graph and apply it to other images with a command line tool

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#48

Post by nothis »

ethelward wrote: post #19
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #14

> ... will use the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together $100k is a sizable donation. I would have hoped that it could do more for the project than update some hardware and organize a hackfest. That's not to say donations in general shouldn't be used for those things. I just would have assumed that a donation of this size would ha…

In Europe (and I guess, the US too), $100K is not even enough to hire an engineer at an average rate for a year. I'm not sure what you'd propose to do with it exactly?

I don't know where you work but there's plenty of places in Europe where you can hire a decent engineer for $100k a year.

Re: GIMP receives a $100K donation

#50

Post by sleepychu »

nothis wrote: post #5
darkwinx wrote: post #2

I hope that someday GIMP will have major change just like Krita & Blender. The UI of GIMP have received many complains.

I want to support GIMP but, especially for fast, professional use, the UI makes it impossible. Their raw features are on par with anything I'd want to do in Photoshop, it's 100% a UI issue at this point. And I don't get why it's this hard for open source projects to realize that (the only notable exception I know is Firefox, which I love).

What do you want changed about the UI? I don't even look at it most of the time. Single window mode/quick toggling of that was the biggest change for me.
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