On Thu, 2010-01-14 at 21:38 +0000, Sam Tygier wrote:

There has recently been much discussion on how long it will take to finish gimp 2.8, and whether donations could speed this up.

Krita (KDE's image manipulation program) recently asked its users for €3000 to sponsor one of their old GSOC students to work for 3 months. they raised over €4000 quite quickly. [0]

I am sure GIMP could raise a similar amount of money with out to much trouble, and has plenty of old GSOC students to call on. 3 months of work would make a pretty big shift in release time.

We wouldn't have to try to raise that money. There's a steady stream of donations coming in and we could easily spend twice that money on a developer if we wanted to do that. But at least so far we have always come to the conclusion that we don't want developers to work on GIMP for money.

I don't think that donations can speed up GIMP development. On the contrary, paying some developers for their work is more likely going to demotivate others.

Sven

I don't think that donations can speed up GIMP development. On the contrary, paying some developers for their work is more likely going to demotivate others.

Don't know why this shouldn't work with the GIMP projekt. This works well for TYPO3 and Blender well too.

I would help to organize such a campaign and I would pay for it!

Zitat von Sven Neumann :

On Thu, 2010-01-14 at 21:38 +0000, Sam Tygier wrote:

There has recently been much discussion on how long it will take to finish gimp 2.8, and whether donations could speed this up.

Krita (KDE's image manipulation program) recently asked its users for ?3000 to sponsor one of their old GSOC students to work for 3 months. they raised over ?4000 quite quickly. [0]

I am sure GIMP could raise a similar amount of money with out to much trouble, and has plenty of old GSOC students to call on. 3 months of work would make a pretty big shift in release time.

We wouldn't have to try to raise that money. There's a steady stream of donations coming in and we could easily spend twice that money on a developer if we wanted to do that. But at least so far we have always come to the conclusion that we don't want developers to work on GIMP for money.

Sven

On 1/15/10, bart wrote:

I don't think that donations can speed up GIMP development. On the contrary, paying some developers for their work is more likely going to demotivate others.

Don't know why this shouldn't work with the GIMP projekt.

You can't just extrapolate experience of one project on the other and get away with that.

GIMP team has been through this before with GEGL in early 2000s and it really didn't work.

Alexandre

Sven Neumann wrote:

I don't think that donations can speed up GIMP development. On the contrary, paying some developers for their work is more likely going to demotivate others.

Since I think this is an important issue and since we are not that many developers, we don't need to guess, we can just ask everyone to give their thoughts on this.

Personally I would be _encouraged_ to further contribute to GIMP if GIMP had someone working full time. Having someone working full time on GIMP would mean that the development speed of GIMP would significantly increase, and it will be more fun to contribute to a project that is moving fast than it is to contribute to a project moving slowly, like GIMP is.

We often point out to people that GIMP is lacking contributors. Maybe the lack of contributors is a side effect of how the project currently is run with regards to money? Maybe being less restrictive about introducing economic incentives to hack on GIMP could give us more contributors and quicker development? Given that GIMP development is not currently where we'd want it to be, I think these are questions that needs to be considered.

/ Martin

On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 08:18 +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote:

Personally I would be _encouraged_ to further contribute to GIMP if GIMP had someone working full time.

I think it depends on the person...

On the other hand, I can also imagine incentives in the form of socks :-), or graphics tablets, or colour-managed displays and printers, or whatever. Competitions for who can convert the most plugins to gtkbuilder (half :-) on that one, but only half) or who can write the most useful tutorial for a new feature.

The programmers are part of a larger community, and it all needs to be vibrant and active...

Liam

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Liam R E Quin wrote:

On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 08:18 +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote:

Personally I would be _encouraged_ to further contribute to GIMP if GIMP had someone working full time.

I think it depends on the person...

On the other hand, I can also imagine incentives in the form of socks :-), or graphics tablets, or colour-managed displays and printers, or whatever.  Competitions for who can convert the most plugins to gtkbuilder (half :-) on that one, but only half) or who can write the most useful tutorial for a new feature.

I actually agree with this. Reward does not have to be money, It could just as well be something interesting that you couldn't/wouldn't get otherwise.

If Gimp aims to be a professional tool, then support for things like decent graphics tablets and extras needs to be there and for it to be there developers need access to the tools. I'm currently trying to scrounge up enough to get myself an intuos/cintiq (naah, cant afford that ever) with at least one of its wheel reporting extras and its proving quite difficult, because these are pro tools and as such cost a lot of money. And when I get one, and do something, It would be really helpful if someone else in the dev team could actually test this code as well without me actually mailing my device out to them. Another thing that developers should at least try to use is screen calibration hardware and color managed process. I personally have never done this bacause of the cost of owning one of the spider devices.

Tablet is something that can motivate anyone slightly artistic to action and wacom makes them in varied sizes and configurations so the size of the task can easily be matched to a suitable tablet for an award. Also, simple things like T-shirts, quality GIMP posters and stickers that are easy to mail and don't cost too much can perhaps perk people up. Appreciation is a strong motivating force.

To summarize, to build a pro product developers need access to pro tools and access to pro tools can be a strong motivator for hacking, but even little tokens of appreciation work.

On Fri, 15 Jan 2010 11:59:13 +0200 Alexia Death wrote:

Another thing that developers should at least try to use is screen calibration hardware and color managed process. I personally have never done this bacause of the cost of owning one of the spider devices.

I'm not exactly a contributing developer, but I do have access to a Spider and calibrated screens. Are there outstanding issues regarding colour management? I might be able to provide some help here.

More significantly it was mentioned elsewhere that the wiki needed "managing". What does this entail? Keeping a watchful eye on new entries? Checking spelling? Validating new users?

I make good use of gimp and would like to put back in some way, but I'm aware that it's easy for an inexperienced developer to be a burden on the others, rather than helpful. Since I'm unlikely to find the time to develop the C skills needed to usefully contribute code, I'm looking for other ways that I can help.

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Martin Nordholts wrote:

We often point out to people that GIMP is lacking contributors. Maybe the lack of contributors is a side effect of how the project currently is run with regards to money?

About three weeks ago someone told me that he wanted to donate some money to Inkscape and it didn't work. As it turned out, our donation system has been broken for years, from the very beginning perhaps. Which means that the only financial support we had all these years is from Google via GsoC. Can you say that Inkscape is not moving fast forward? :)

Mind you, it does work for other projects. Ardour's principal developer relies mostly on the money from monthly subscriptions and sK1 team relies mostly on money they get from adverts.

But when you say:

Personally I would be _encouraged_ to further contribute to GIMP if GIMP had someone working full time.

it's vitally important to understand that this person is supposed to have leading position in the project. Otherwise it will end up in clashes.

Alexandre

Hi,

On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 11:59 +0200, Alexia Death wrote:

If Gimp aims to be a professional tool, then support for things like decent graphics tablets and extras needs to be there and for it to be there developers need access to the tools. I'm currently trying to scrounge up enough to get myself an intuos/cintiq (naah, cant afford that ever) with at least one of its wheel reporting extras and its proving quite difficult, because these are pro tools and as such cost a lot of money.

Why aren't you just asking if you can have this hardware paid from the GIMP account? We are getting several hundred dollars of donations per week and can easily afford buying developers the hardware they need.

Sven

PS: I am leaving for vacation and won't be back before February. But if you guys decide that Alexia should get a tablet paid, you don't need to wait for me coming back. She has my support.

On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 11:35 +0100, Jon Senior wrote:

I'm not exactly a contributing developer, but I do have access to a Spider and calibrated screens. Are there outstanding issues regarding colour management? I might be able to provide some help here.

We most urgently need a developer interested in improving color management. If we have such a developer, we can certainly use such devices.

More significantly it was mentioned elsewhere that the wiki needed "managing". What does this entail? Keeping a watchful eye on new entries? Checking spelling? Validating new users?

That and keeping the Wiki free of Spam.

Sven

On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 08:18 +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote:

Personally I would be _encouraged_ to further contribute to GIMP if GIMP had someone working full time. Having someone working full time on GIMP would mean that the development speed of GIMP would significantly increase, and it will be more fun to contribute to a project that is moving fast than it is to contribute to a project moving slowly, like GIMP is.

Having someone work on GIMP full-time is something entirely different than paying for features. It has my full support. But I am afraid that it will be extremely difficult to find someone capable and willing to do this job. And it will be extremely difficult to find a company who is willing to hire a developer and to let him/her work on GIMP full time.

Sven

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 6:48 PM, Sven Neumann wrote:

Hi,

On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 11:59 +0200, Alexia Death wrote:

If Gimp aims to be a professional tool, then support for things like decent graphics tablets and extras needs to be there and for it to be there developers need access to the tools. I'm currently trying to scrounge up enough to get myself an intuos/cintiq (naah, cant afford that ever) with at least one of its wheel reporting extras and its proving quite difficult, because these are pro tools and as such cost a lot of money.

Why aren't you just asking if you can have this hardware paid from the GIMP account? We are getting several hundred dollars of donations per week and can easily afford buying developers the hardware they need.

Well, I didn't know it was an option, and my interest in such device is not limited to just developing gimp, so I've been plotting to get one on my own... But it would help a lot if me and someone else, like Martin or Mitch had the same set, for testing etc purposes.

Alexia Death wrote:

Why aren't you just asking if you can have this hardware paid from the GIMP account? We are getting several hundred dollars of donations per week and can easily afford buying developers the hardware they need.

Well, I didn't know it was an option, and my interest in such device is not limited to just developing gimp, so I've been plotting to get one on my own... But it would help a lot if me and someone else, like Martin or Mitch had the same set, for testing etc purposes.

I totally support you getting tablet hardware using GIMP money, it will be money well spent

/ Martin

Martin Nordholts wrote:

Well, I didn't know it was an option, and my interest in such device is not limited to just developing gimp, so I've been plotting to get one on my own... But it would help a lot if me and someone else, like Martin or Mitch had the same set, for testing etc purposes.

I totally support you getting tablet hardware using GIMP money, it will be money well spent

/ Martin

Oh you also proposed to buy one for me or mitch too so we can debug together etc

Well I don't think I'll use it very much, it's better to use that money for something else

/ Martin

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 7:10 PM, Martin Nordholts wrote:

Oh you also proposed to buy one for me or mitch too so we can debug together etc

Well I don't think I'll use it very much, it's better to use that money for something else

Well, my goal in that was mostly to save debugging time. The stack for tablets under gimp tends to break quite often and being able to verify if its my system or gimp thats broken is a value. There have been issues everywhere, but mostly they come from GDK, and sometimes X. perhaps in this case mitch is a better candiate because he works on GDK and tablet testing there is needed. I think he has something very old already but it does not provide the full feature set.

On 2010-01-15 18:02, Alexia Death wrote:

Well, I didn't know it was an option, and my interest in such device is not limited to just developing gimp, so I've been plotting to get one on my own... But it would help a lot if me and someone else, like Martin or Mitch had the same set, for testing etc purposes.

If you want pen rotation for for developing but you also need a tablet for your personal artistic needs, the best choice would be getting a Wacom Intuos4 Medium tablet + Art Pen (undiscounted price: about 370 + 100 euro), although if you're really into drawing and painting then you should get an Intuos4 Large which costs 480 euro (+ 100 euro Art Pen). These are prices from the official Wacom.eu shop; online retails prices are usually about 10% lower. If you're really on a budget (or better, if Gimp funds don't allow for such expenses) then you should get an Intuos4 Small (Wacom price: 225 euro), although I personally don't recommend it for drawing or painting as it's way too small. For testing/developing tablet support on Gimp would be more than enough anyway.

Sven Neumann wrote:

Having someone work on GIMP full-time is something entirely different than paying for features. It has my full support.

Ok then it seems like we're on the same page, I am also skeptical about bounties for features, there's just to much potential problems with that.

/ Martin

On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 19:17 +0200, Alexia Death wrote:

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 7:10 PM, Martin Nordholts wrote:

Oh you also proposed to buy one for me or mitch too so we can debug together etc

Well I don't think I'll use it very much, it's better to use that money for something else

Well, my goal in that was mostly to save debugging time. The stack for tablets under gimp tends to break quite often and being able to verify if its my system or gimp thats broken is a value. There have been issues everywhere, but mostly they come from GDK, and sometimes X. perhaps in this case mitch is a better candiate because he works on GDK and tablet testing there is needed. I think he has something very old already but it does not provide the full feature set.

As far as I know the tablet that Mitch owns is a Wacom I (with serial connection). It's the same model that I sent you last year. These tablets were donated by Wacom in 1999 for the first GIMP developer conference.

It might make sense to ask Wacom if they can donate some more so that the GIMP developers can work with more recent models. But if they aren't willing to donate hardware, we can just buy one or two tablets from the project money that we have.

Sven

* Sven Neumann [01-15-10 13:18]:

As far as I know the tablet that Mitch owns is a Wacom I (with serial connection). It's the same model that I sent you last year. These tablets were donated by Wacom in 1999 for the first GIMP developer conference.

It might make sense to ask Wacom if they can donate some more so that the GIMP developers can work with more recent models. But if they aren't willing to donate hardware, we can just buy one or two tablets from the project money that we have.

If Wacom will not donate, perhaps they would be willing to deeply discount some hardware ???

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Sven Neumann wrote:

As far as I know the tablet that Mitch owns is a Wacom I (with serial connection). It's the same model that I sent you last year. These tablets were donated by Wacom in 1999 for the first GIMP developer conference.

That makes these devices 11 years old and they are amazing. The one you sent me works fine, and with little hackery I even managed to make it hotpluggable using a serial adapter and some custom python to introduce it to my X when it appears. However it does not have the extras available that report wheel component. For that either Intuos 3 or intuos 4 series devices are needed and artpen and/or airbrush extra tool.

On Friday 15 January 2010, SHIRAKAWA Akira wrote:

On 2010-01-15 18:02, Alexia Death wrote:

Well, I didn't know it was an option, and my interest in such device is not limited to just developing gimp, so I've been plotting to get one on my own... But it would help a lot if me and someone else, like Martin or Mitch had the same set, for testing etc purposes.

If you want pen rotation for for developing but you also need a tablet for your personal artistic needs, the best choice would be getting a Wacom Intuos4 Medium tablet + Art Pen

Adding my two cents -- from the perspective of the Krita maintainer... That's the setup I got for Krita after doing a donation drive for tablets -- I would have liked to have airbrushes to go with them, but our funds didn't stretch as far, and we couldn't get into contact with anyone at Wacom.

By the way, I think that Alexia is completely right when suggesting to get two rigs: we did the same for Krita, one for the brush engine developer, one for me (or to send around). That way, bugs can be reproduced reasonably easily, even if the other developer doesn't use it for creating art.

(undiscounted price: about 370 +
100 euro), although if you're really into drawing and painting then you should get an Intuos4 Large which costs 480 euro (+ 100 euro Art Pen). These are prices from the official Wacom.eu shop; online retails prices are usually about 10% lower. If you're really on a budget (or better, if Gimp funds don't allow for such expenses) then you should get an Intuos4 Small (Wacom price: 225 euro), although I personally don't recommend it for drawing or painting as it's way too small. For testing/developing tablet support on Gimp would be more than enough anyway.

I also thought that getting a small wacom wouldn't be as useful since the feel of those are quite different.

On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 20:31 +0200, Alexia Death wrote:

That makes these devices 11 years old and they are amazing. The one you sent me works fine, and with little hackery I even managed to make it hotpluggable using a serial adapter and some custom python to introduce it to my X when it appears. However it does not have the extras available that report wheel component. For that either Intuos 3 or intuos 4 series devices are needed and artpen and/or airbrush extra tool.

Actually, the tablet came with an airbrush tool that has an extra wheel. Did I forget to send you the airbrush pen?

Sven

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 9:32 PM, Sven Neumann wrote:

On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 20:31 +0200, Alexia Death wrote:

That makes these devices 11 years old and they are amazing. The one you sent me works fine, and with little hackery I even managed to make it hotpluggable using a serial adapter and some custom python to introduce it to my X when it appears. However it does not have the extras available that report wheel component. For that either Intuos 3 or intuos 4 series devices are needed and artpen and/or airbrush extra tool.

Actually, the tablet came with an airbrush tool that has an extra wheel. Did I forget to send you the airbrush pen?

I only got the regular one. I googled to see if intuos 1 series even had an airbrush and did not get any links so I assumed it didnt have one...

On Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:50:17 +0100 Sven Neumann wrote:

We most urgently need a developer interested in improving color management. If we have such a developer, we can certainly use such devices.

I don't think that I have enough C knowledge here (or specifically, GTK knowledge), but I see that you do have a volunteer.

More significantly it was mentioned elsewhere that the wiki needed "managing". What does this entail? Keeping a watchful eye on new entries? Checking spelling? Validating new users?

That and keeping the Wiki free of Spam.

This I can do. Do you need "references"? Should I just sign up as a normal user? I'm trying to connect to wiki.gimp.org at the minute and it's timing out the connection. Attempts to ping it result in

From soda-10g-edge.EECS.Berkeley.EDU (169.229.59.242) icmp_seq=2 Destination Host Unreachable

If someone could get the wiki connected to the net again, I'll gladly assume responsibility for keeping it clean.

Sven Neumann wrote:

On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 08:18 +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote:

Personally I would be _encouraged_ to further contribute to GIMP if GIMP had someone working full time. Having someone working full time on GIMP would mean that the development speed of GIMP would significantly increase, and it will be more fun to contribute to a project that is moving fast than it is to contribute to a project moving slowly, like GIMP is.

Having someone work on GIMP full-time is something entirely different than paying for features. It has my full support. But I am afraid that it will be extremely difficult to find someone capable and willing to do this job. And it will be extremely difficult to find a company who is willing to hire a developer and to let him/her work on GIMP full time.

Sven

How about working full time for a short period.

Could it be integrated with this years google summer of code. if you don't gets as many places as you would like, then the community sponsor an extra place. Or if a student completes their task, but the is still room for extension, then the community sponsors keeping them on for another n months.

sam

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 11:52 AM, sam tygier wrote:

Sven Neumann wrote:

Having someone work on GIMP full-time is something entirely different than paying for features. It has my full support. But I am afraid that it will be extremely difficult to find someone capable and willing to do this job. And it will be extremely difficult to find a company who is willing to hire a developer and to let him/her work on GIMP full time.

How about working full time for a short period.

Could it be integrated with this years google summer of code. if you don't gets as many places as you would like, then the community sponsor an extra place. Or if a student completes their task, but the is still room for extension, then the community sponsors keeping them on for another n months.

I think this is a good idea and am willing to help with the fund raising.

Rolf

I'm sure it will work even better for GIMP, that being said, consider that krita, it's not that "known", GIMP is a common thing you hear everywhere(in art sites, photography sites, ps "clone", etc).

Also there is a big windows-user base(with a nice windows build ready to use), and it's a paing to install krita on Windows(there is not a krita build, you have to get koffice packages, not very tested, i tried but hated the installer)

Considering this two things, speeding up development that today seems so slow(and lots of bugs never find a solution) is possible, at least it could take GIMP project somewhere. A full-time worker paid by donations is a nice idea.

Maybe the today almost 800 bugs could be reduce to half.

There has recently been much discussion on how long it will take to finish gimp 2.8, and whether donations could speed this up.

Krita (KDE's image manipulation program) recently asked its users for EUR3000 to sponsor one of their old GSOC students to work for 3 months. they raised over EUR4000 quite quickly. [0]

I am sure GIMP could raise a similar amount of money with out to much trouble, and has plenty of old GSOC students to call on. 3 months of work would make a pretty big shift in release time.

Might be an interesting experiment.

sam

[0] http://krita.org/index.php&option=com_content&id=20

PS: i tried posting through gmane's NNTP system, but it never seemed to get through. is this blocked?