The logistics themselves are already giving me a headache. You have $400k, but are Gimp's developers (and they exist, right?) ready to just get an infusion of somewhere on the order of three years of salary and get to work? I assume the roadmap would change with that amount of funding.

I've seen some cases where patreon.com is used to fund open source projects. Vue.js is founded there for example [1].

1: https://www.patreon.com/evanyou

It's probably attainable if those 1000 people manage to confine their feature requests to something 400k can fund.

There are crowdfunding sites that either just happen to be used for these things or are focused on them, the issues are complex. Here's a run-down (that needs a couple updates like including Open Collective): https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfundi... (on the wiki for a still in-progress platform designing a new funding approach around the specific challenges of free/libre/open projects)

Sketch is 99 dollars a year. After the year you can still use it but you won't get updates. If you work on a team you'll pretty much be forced to always have the latest version.

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.

No Linux version.