Really? How? :)
You are ignoring non-profits and countries foreign to you.
In the context of this discussion, the question was why companies aren’t funding GIMP development, and the ones that can’t afford a $20/mo aren’t the ones who would be funding development anyway.
Yes, of course there’s a market for free stuff. But the price of admission into the existing paid for products is low enough that there’s little motivation to fund it.
GIMP 2.99.x (future 3.0) is shipping with support for Python, Script-Fu, Lua, JavaScript, and Vala as languages for extensions.
The last time I used Gimp, the Gimp Python extension was an optional module that wasn’t included in the build I had But it’s been a while clearly and I missed it. I’ll edit my prior comment
Would it be nice to have? Sure. But there are tons of alternatives to Photoshop that just don’t compete on market share, despite photoshop lagging behind in many areas.
If companies were backing an OSS editor though, Krita is by far more favoured by professional creatives. It’s more familiar coming from Photoshop, has better extensibility+Python scripting+Qt which is great for pipelines and has a much better handling of color science and other features important for professionals.