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.
"....In a similar situation in Los Angeles four staff members and I were talking in front of the Biltmore Hotel when I demonstrated the same point, saying: "Look, I am holding a ten-dollar bill in my hand. I propose to walk around the Biltmore Hotel, a total of four blocks, and try to give it away. This will certainly be outside of everyone's experience. You four walk behind me and watch the faces of the people I'll approach. I am going to go up to them holding out this ten-dollar bill and say, 'Here, take this.' My guess is that everyone will back off, look confused, insulted, or fearful, and want to get away from this nut fast.
From their experience when someone approaches them he is either out to ask for instructions or to panhandle — particularly the way I'm dressed, no coat or tie."
I walked around, trying to give the ten-dollar bill away. The reactions were all "within the experiences of the people." About three of them, seeing the ten-dollar bill, spoke first — "I'm sorry. I don't have any change." Others hurried past saying, "I'm sorry, I don't have any money on me right now," as though I had been trying to get money from them instead of trying to give them money. One young woman flared up, almost screaming, "I'm not that kind of a girl and if you don't get away from here, I'll call a cop!" Another woman in her thirties snarled, "I don't come that cheap!" There was one man who stopped and said, "What kind of a con game is this?"...."
https://archive.org/stream/RulesForRadicals/RulesForRadicals...
I'd give up on ten dollars if it means not having to fight/argue this way on the street.
Means I end up paralysed around starting new endeavours.
The wage slaves.
IANAL
Obviously a lot more of the details would need to be worked out to try and minimize how much companies try and game that to simply fund their own research tax-free, but I wonder if the type of behavior you're looking for could be economically incentivized given the right corporate tax legal reforms.
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. Which means they really just managed to get a tax write-off while picking up more customers.
How do you ensure a company is doing something in the best interests of society or the charity or organization they are donating to, rather than in the best interests of themselves?
Generally speaking, it's pretty difficult to tell if charities are actually being charitable, and there is no way to ensure it -- we can't mark each dollar's fall. But we do have laws that cover those sort of 'hidden catch' scenario; you can't trick people into a financial obligation. Is there some other loophole that you can identify?
And of course, as my source demonstrated, there is definitely a license cost to use Chromebooks in a managed environment, and it is not free for educators.
As the situation is _right now_, the law is probably fine, but I'd be against the parent's suggestion of allowing a loophole for them to get to repatriate cash tax-free for this sort of usage, because it's likely just going to work out in their favor, and not in ours or the public interest.
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.
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.
You need to show that those licenses were not included in the gift. And let's just assume that they're not that stupid.
> 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.
For a budget windows laptop or tablet the hardware cost would be higher and the support cost unlikely to be lesser.
> Schools is definitely big money for Google
Schools are a tiny segment for Google that would not hurt them in the slightest to lose. The margins on low-end hardware are not exactly the stuff dreams are made of, and they really are making peanuts on ChromeOS. We can and should contrast this to Microsoft, who has been playing the "loss leader" pricing game in educational circles for far longer with far more success.
From a quick search, it looks like the IRS does sometimes allow businesses to make deductible contributions to a 501(c)3, but that it first attempts to determine if the business expects to receive a "substantial return benefit". [0]
The IRS seems to already have specific rules around "qualified sponsorship payments". [1]
[0] https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/corporat...
[1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p598/ch03.html#en_US_201701...
Here's the thing, in corporate devs are as essential as people toghtening nuts in a factory.
The value one produces there is multiplyed by the internal know how, customer base, marketing reach and tight focus management, none of which it's brough by the developer.
That value is stripped from developer work just to be pocketed by management and sales is a myth, besides, if it werent there'd be plenty developers going solo and the median salary would be in the millions.
Edit: and lo and behold, instant downvote. No wonders the tech community is so blind and guillible when it comes to the value argument, from the extraction myth to the stock options gambling.
Some developers are just writing code to satisfy a spec and really could be replaced by any other developer; others are uniquely valuable and significantly increase their employers value, without necessarily being recognised for it.
Good software acts as a multiplier, so it's not equivalent to tightening bolts. It's more equivalent to finding optimisations that reduce the number of bolts which need to be tightened. A relatively small amount of software can drastically increase the value of a company/process
It's true that an individual can't do the same things a company can do. That's not some profound assertion. It's however impossible to go from that and assert that is because they are incapable of doing those things even if they had the funding to do so. That is to say that the marketing issue is more or less an issue of funding or money. That is what keeps that individual devs from capturing more value that is instead captured by companies or by managers, marketers, etc. As well as hiring additional people to form an actual company that performs the functions of a company. However a significant number of founders are developers, many of them including Paul Gahram and Mark Zuckerberg average developers that went to found multi-million to billion dollar companies because of funding. Now after the fact maybe you can argue that there was something special about them, but that's a post-facto assertion. They were average devs and if they had not gotten the funding would be relegated to your nut bolt tighteners not having been able to express their "true" potential.
If you allow for faux currency exchange, keeping your eyes aimed down at a renaissance fairground is pretty much guaranteed to turn up enough food tickets for a turkey leg.
You ask if anyone lost any money. If someone says they did, you follow up with "how much money, and how big were the bills?"
Then they have to know an amount, how many bills, and what denomination.
You can imagine that it's hard to fake, and anyone being genuine will have a pretty good idea of what you're holding.
Once, while eating a pizza with canned mussels, he felt something hard. It turned out there was a pearl in his pizza.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-391...
It happens.
1996 (±2 years) in an arcade, actually.
It was really ragged, so much so that the bank wouldn't take it. So I still have it.
But it was neat, finding money just right out there on my own lawn.
Sometimes money literally falls out my pocket when I fumble out a wad of cash while i'm inebriated.
Other times I carelessly leave my wallet somewhere stupid and the money "walks off."
Over the past 2 years, I've probably lost over $1000 this way.
Also, "proof" is a noun. You meant to use verb form "proove". "Proof" as a verb means to "proof-read" (to read with an editorial mindset).
The last one is the best.
Chris Webber, for example, took less than a $40k salary without benefits to work on MediaGoblin full time for a year:
The games industry gladly takes advantage of this.
CRUD apps may be tedious, but getting a job at a local medium-sized company working on them is usually much more pleasant than working for a game developer.
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.
Indeed it did, and that plugin was hard to configure and hard to use. I remember installing GIMP just to try that plugin out, and it was not fun, it involved a lot of manual steps to get it working, and I never quite got the hang of it.
In contrast, when I got my hands on a version of PS that supported content aware fill, (which admittedly ships in the box, skipping the installation step) I was able to figure it out in a few minutes and start getting good results in half an hour. I am pretty sure I spent more than half an hour trying to get the GIMP plugin installed.
The bigger issue is if you can pull a 400k Kickstarter and manage such a team why the hell would you be wasting your time on GIMP dev - you could do waay more profitable and interesting stuff.
If you're really hung up on whether 3 is the right number, I think you've entirely missed the point of my post. Adobe has far more people working on photoshop.
And most developers are definitely underpaid relative to the value we provide. From shabby CRUD through deep machine learning research, we're generally underpaid. Partly it's our own collective fault, though: as a group we're told constantly that passion for the product and satisfaction at "being paid [anything] for doing what you love" should be enough, and enough of us buy that crap that it effectively depresses wages.
Yes, but it is three full time people. Don't underestimate the difference being able to focus on a codebase for an extended period makes...
Also, knowing that you will be able to continue that focus carries it's own benefit.
From my experience, you can hire a good developer from Vietnam for approx ~2k per month; which is 24k per year.
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.
As long as you wrote useful features then GIMP, for example, wouldn't be able to argue semantics on the patch set and tie up merging for a long time on politics. Their users would demand the features.
(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)
The opportunity with Photoshop may not be to create another Photoshop clone, or add more features, but rather create smaller, specialized editing apps, that each target a subset of the Photoshop user-base, with perhaps less features.
Look at how Adobe Lightroom cherry picked a few Photoshop and Bridge components, to create a more specialized app that does a specialized job that Photoshop might have done in the past.
Or how Adobe's iPad Pro apps again deliver just a small subset of the total available features from their parent apps, making them more specialized for specific use-cases.
Photoshop's massive fragmented user base is ripe for the pickin' for sure. Could you tear down Gimp like that? Or would it be better to start from scratch?
Hate to break it to you, but not one person who uses photoshop uses Linux.
Not true: I use photoshop (albeit, not professionally) and have a subscription for it, but am writing this from linux. Dualboot exists, you know.
But I would still say Linux support isn't what's holding back any photoshop replacement
The reason is a simple value estimation. It's open source (and so free to get) therefore its price is $0. Any product that is free signals that the product has correspondingly low value. I think it's simply unrealistic to expect people to put forward $400 for something with such low value perception and whose fair market price is $0.
This is especially true when Photoshop has such a high value perception (in part because it is better, and in part as a justification for shelling out the $400).
Ask yourself this - Have you, or will you, paid (donated, ...) $70 for using Vim (atom, neovim, emacs, VSC, ...) to support development? Have you paid $200 to Debian, Ubuntu, or Redhat for your Linux OS? $5,000 for (open|libre)ssl? $13,000 per core for PostgreSQL/MySQL?
I would be curious if the GIMP dev team could reach usability parity with Photoshop on only that money. It seems a bit on the low side frankly (about a year's time of a good developer and UX designer, plus support staff).
I would say that I'm in too, but I also need a quality Illustrator alternative that works well on Mac.
I use it and love it and it's one of my favourite programs, but really it's better in Linux.
Yes and no. I'm doing that right now...
The key is that I don't charge for the software as such. I charge for services, etc. around the software.
People are happy to pay for value-add, even if the underlying software is free. You just need to show value-add...
This change in how the money is allocated is a subtle, but important, distinction. Monetizing a service means you now have a minimum of two products to manage, and from my time at a company which did exactly this I've found that the OSS software development is the product which absorbs any shortfalls. It's hard to watch the budget for OSS development shrink constantly; to watch developers passionate about the OSS software being reassigned to grow the service instead.
It's probably still the best way to handle a crummy situation, but it's not what the OP described.
Yep. Matt Mullenweg & his crew at WordPress have been doing the same thing, and are wildly profitable at it.
I'm reminded about the kickstarter for Django migrations: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-mig...
Most backers gave 5 or 10 pounds, but on average ~500 people gave ~35 each.
You might be half-right about perceived value though - I think anyone that is a serious Gimp user see value in the software, but might still think 400 is too steep, given that it is free now. But I also think many users would be willing to pay for getting some features in/some polish done - personally I'd say my current limit would be around 100 USD for any one OSS project.
Now one one hand, Debian does much more than any small project, but I also think it's more likely that 10 000 USD would do more for something like the Gimp, than for Debian (assuming we had a developer or two on standby that could take the opportunity of devoting a month full time on getting some pain points resolved, say).
For what it's worth, I think Sketch is much more user friendly and is $99 one-time. Certainly not OSS, but a better deal than Photoshop for most things, and a much more user-friendly interface than Gimp (though I suppose that's subjective).
Still, 99/year is a drop in the bucket. Even 50/month for all of creative suite isn't all that much considering many of us will just add it to our business expenses and write it off.
Also, $400k is, like, nothing in developer time (compared to what Adobe puts into their software, at least).
More money may help entice more time to be taken from some of those other things, but some of those are more or less fixed (job, chores), not sustainable to give up for long (sleep, relaxing) or simply not worth a small (or any) amount of money to give up (family).
Enough money and stability that someone can give up their day job -- that's a different story. But that's a very big jump, and suddenly even $400k doesn't really go that far, assuming you can even get that money. There's a reason very few open source projects have a full-time developer being compensated by the community.
ChromeOS uses the Linux kernel.
Students getting Chromebooks aren't sucked into the Linux ecosystem and open source community that encourages you to improve parts of the system yourself. Instead, it leaves system maintenance (and learning experience) entirely to the administrator and really only provides Chrome as the operating system, with all implications.
Control your data locally? Why not upload it to Google Drive instead. Learn git commands? Better find that hidden Developer Mode switch, because crosh isn't going to get you very far. Get involved in improving Linux or Chromium? Nah, better edit some JavaScript in a web view with someone else's proprietary online code editor.
Google can (and will) swap Linux out of Chromium whenever they want to, because none of the interfaces and none of the community overlap. When Fuchsia gets swapped in, neither you nor the students will notice, and it won't have made a difference other than Linux having helped Google's locked-down, centrally controlled platform to succeed.
Either way, ChromeOS doesn't contribute to taking (co-)ownership of any of the above and encouraging the freedoms commonly associated with the use of Linux. Neither does it sustainably establish even the Linux kernel as pillar of the OS, it's just an implementation detail to be hidden and potentially replaced later. So why exactly should we look at ChromeOS as GNU/Linux having taken off for the casual user?
But it's hard to convince people to hand over their money. SaaS works because the profits are reinvested into marketing.
Now if you wanted to throw $400 for a photoshop like system to start from the ground up and work across all three platforms, I think you've got a great idea. You'd avoid the cruft, you could do subscription/pay-per-use cloud based filters, you could start with 32bits per channel from the start, instead of the slow transition to GEGL...
Perhaps the best person to ask is a photoshop user who actually paid for it?
CS is expensive and I use a small part of its features... if GIMP covered just 25% of what photoshop could do, I would use it. But I think the only people who think GIMP is close to replacing it are those that have never used/learned photoshop.
Adobe regularly copies features from the GIMP, like content-aware fill
I actually pay, not just for CS, but an entire Windows computer to run it. The rest of my computers run Linux, and I use open source software everywhere.
I would absolutely love to switch to GIMP, if it were at all possible.
But PS is the only program I have ever had to take a class in to be productive in, as it was clearly built to be familiar to people with very clearly-formed ideas about workflow, e.g. old-school photography and design folks.
And switching to GIMP is possible methinks, you just have to learn the interface. Just like Photoshop...
The commenter above you used the software for 15+ years and specifically cited that lack of feature parity is the only criticism keeping them on CC. I have used both as well and do not follow your opinion about Photoshop, maybe because I never used those old school design tools. To me it looks like an Adobe UI.
Overall I just don't understand how you read the comments above and determined the solution is to learn the interface - honestly, the most tired and uninformed defense of GIMP there is. Especially when your primary criticism of Photoshop was... The interface. I guess the argument could be made you eventually get used to working around inexplicable deficiencies like above, but switching to GIMP is not possible if you need the features only included in Photoshop. There's not some random cosmic reason Blender and Inkscape are considered healthy competitors in their respective domains but not GIMP.
Why do you feel so strongly against 'learning the interface'? That "tired and uninformed defense" is also... what you must do. Why is everyone so afraid of learning?? Fucking wimps. You have a problem, you google it, repeat til you know the product. SO HARD!
I write a lot because I want to clearly explain my points on the Internet where there's no verbal nuance. Sorry if it was too much. Are you really criticizing me for thorough explanation on a discussion forum?
Edit: I should probably qualify that in the capacity I use photoshop it's kind of a moot point anyway, since I depend on illustrator just as much and the convenience of smart objects and the interoperability with stuff like libraries are more than worth the price of admission for me.
I could list 4 other points, but really it's just about that one. Photoshop has had 16 bits per channel since 1992 when version 2.5 was released. That's what... 25 YEARS!
Gimp is FINALLY 16bit per channel now in 2017 with their latest beta.
Seashore was a try at this a decade ago.
http://seashore.sourceforge.net/The_Seashore_Project/Screens...
A lot of coders doing side projects do it for fun and to learn and that often means making their own architecture decisions (and mistakes) so they can practice that process and learn
From Dictionary.com:
>> Usually Disparaging and Offensive. a term used to refer to a person who limps or is lame.
>> Origin
>> An Americanism dating back to 1920-25; origin uncertain
>> Usage note
>> When describing someone who is lame, gimp is used with disparaging intent and perceived as insulting. But within the disability community, it is sometimes a term of self-reference.
Maybe "Imp" is offensive in other languages? (Nothing other than alternate English meanings shows on Wiktionary).
In this case, Photoshop will continue to dominate (unless they get lazy/give up) because they have recurring cash to reinvest.
The issue of having to pay to get access to your tool it's a big issue.
For big companies having to pay for 100 workstations yearly the monetary incentive is big.
Once many people is aware that in the long term it's a better deal to put their money into software libre projects, maybe different companies could compite to get your money.
Content aware fill was in Gimp before Photoshop. It was an open-source PhD project.
I get they are FOSS. But, they could still add in their GUI options that don't exist; then prompt donations that would go towards the features development.
For example, Image > Rotate, triggers a pop-up, "Sorry, Rotating image is not currently a feature but with your support we'd love to add it to GIMP! We expect it will cost $10,000 and we've already raised $4,235 from users like you. Contribute now..."
But there are very good Photoshop competitors that don't cost a lot of money. Pixelmator is $29 and a better program for many users. It's lightning fast to open and use and it requires less computing resources.
I remain deeply unconvinced that any software that requires an elite UI and interaction model will ever come out of a software libre solution. In addition, most software libre solutions are simply copies off of someone's else's ideas and hard work. It can't exist without paid software to copy first.
What are we even doing in tech and software if we are arguing that people should copy other people's work and then make it free, causing people to lose their jobs?
Hyperbole much? GIMP is high quality software and I'm sure I'm not the only one who prefers it to Photoshop.
> copy other people's work and then make it free, causing people to lose their jobs?
Wikipedia is a fully free project and the foundation employs ~300 people funded mostly by an annual donation drive. Free software != no jobs.
And I really don't want to get into it, but for a lot of free software advocates extorting money from people for licenses using legally granted artificial monopoly of scarcity on software you don't even have to disclose for the cost is highly unethical.
The main problem is people do not want to learn a new interface or have programs running only on Windows.
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.
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-...
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.
Just because a solution exists does not mean that it's a suitable one, or can't be improved upon.
This solves the issue that you get with subscription based services, which is that if you stop paying every month/year you loose access to the tool to do your work.
Instead of building yet another SaaS wouldn't be smarter for users to gather and pay for a software libre solution?