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).
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?