I agree, but in this particular case i have to ask... how many companies are actually USING Krita? My impression is that the vast majority of places that need software like that use Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator, or Affinity Photo/Designer.

That's exactly the problem.

Not only that they use privative products - it's that people think about Krita as an alternative to Photoshop, as Krita is intended for digital painting rather than general raster image manipulation. Hence narrowing the target of Krita to a much smaller audience.

To an extent, it is, since a lot of artists use PS to draw/paint. For those people, Krita is indeed an alternative to PS.

> how many companies are actually USING Krita?

Assuming a product that advertises its lack of corporate support won’t be super welcoming of commercial users.

I see it used by concept-art artists in gamedev studios from time to time.

Probably not many if you don't count small individual art studios - the mobile gacha game industry(and anime animation to some extent) don't standardize art styles and pipeline art production as done in American movie and comic industries, but relies on intimate collaborations with external, individual artists for creative components.

So they mostly only import (Krita-exported) PSD into Ps, or even if Krita was used professionally on the floor by employed artists, choice of tools would be up to artist's discretion and might not become a corporate talking point in the way, say, what Maya or Lightwave debate would be.

Maybe OnlyFans/Patreon could throw a million or two for couple years...? But Krita is not the first choice across the board, and creators on those platform don't seem too concerned with CSP/Procreate subscriptions, so that might be a difficult path too?

When corporate support rolls in, project tend to turn sour.

Demand from the corporate entities proceed to dominate rather than voices from individual donations. Its a double edged sword.

That's because many corporate "donations" are not so much a donation as a way of soft-buying a feature.

It's hard for businesses hyperfocused on short-term gains to understand a long-term value of, for example, supporting an alternative for an industry-dominating Adobe toolkit. But the value is there.

Long-term value that's hard to define doesn't translate well to stock price especially when any investment also helps competitors who aren't investing anything into the project.

Krita is accepting corporate donations.

And the examples are? Cause the counter examples are phenomenal like Blender and Linux.

Khara threw a bag of pachinko money in Blender's face to make the last Evangelion film work, and it was fine. I guess that was a rare occurrence that they desperately and so purely needed a tool they can hand to broke freelancers without frantically searching for keygens, but it can totally happen when incentives are right.

> Open Source support really needs to be normalized in corporate environment

It won't. The only real workaround right now is to simultaneously launch SaaS alongside the FOSS project and monetize that heavily.

> It won't. The only real workaround right now is to simultaneously launch SaaS alongside the FOSS project and monetize that heavily.

It can work. Paying for software is already a normal part of doing business, make this work to your advantage. For example:

- In the budgeting process just add a line item for the FOSS software you're using and put a number on it that's lower than the proprietary alternative. - If you're already using the software (like Krita in this case), tell whoever is in charge of the purse strings how much time, effort, and money the software has saved the company and ask them to make a one-off or recurring payment to the project that's lower than the alternative. You'll be surprised how often they say yes (as long as they can get a receipt)

In a corporate setting, it will help if open source software has easy deployment configurations to track usage and ensure vulnerable versions are not lurking somewhere. Firefox for instance has this.