[This is my reply to a press inquire to gimp@gnome.org. Unfortunately, the email address provided by the journalist does not work, I get a "user unknown" SMTP error when replying (and I've retried several times).

So instead of providing some material to an article in one of the (online) publications of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforma, this might only make it to our mailing lists, but at least it is published somewhere.]

On 13.05.2013 23:52, Cora Bravo Laborie wrote:

This is Cora Bravo, reporter at the mexican newspaper Reforma. I would like to ask you for an interview via e-mail to talk about GIMP and the Adobe's announce of their new payment scheme. My objective is to explain that there are a lot of other alternatives for profesional and casual designers.

Hi Cora,

this is Michael Schumacher, long-time contributor to GIMP and organizer of some sorts of things around it, e.g. getting the GIMP team to the Libre Graphics conference or making GIMP participate in Google Summer of Code.

The article is going to be published in the technology supplement of the newspaper the next saturday, on may 18th. So it would be great if you could answer before wednesday. I will really apreciate it.

I want to take the opportunity for sending my questions:

Is GIMP complete option for people who don't want to pay for Photoshop?

GIMP isn't supposed to be a copy of Adobe Photoshop. So if anyone approaches along "I want Photoshop, but I don't want to pay for it" and picks GIMP, they're most likely going to be disappointed.

Why?

They will only notice the differences and won't see the features GIMP has to offer.

For what kind of user is GIMP?

It is for users who can identify with the goals and characteristics set forth in our vision briefing, see
http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/Vision_briefing

They will have to realize that GIMP is a unique application, not striving to copy other software, but implementing its own goals and trying to achieve this in the best possible way.

They are welcome to use it and participate in the development, but will discover that a solely demanding attitude won't get them very far.

What do I will find in GIMP?

Not sure if I understand this question - if you're searching for a description of GIMP's feature, then http://www.gimp.org/about/introduction.html could be the place to start. But the list there isn't exhaustive.

What do you think about the new payment schemes adopted by companies like Adobe and Microsoft?

I think that it won't have any noticeable impact on their revenue, but on the composition of the user base of their software. Instead of the users who pay for a couple of version of their software and then use it indefinitely, and the (few?) users who pirate it, they will have recurring payments from subscribers and suffer less piracy.

Do you think that free options like GIMP will grow in the market?

Maybe. I expect that some users might move from Adobe Photoshop to GIMP, but I am not sure if we will notice the increase.

But if we do, I hope it won't be as endless streams of mails requesting to "make GIMP more like Photoshop".

What is the future for licensing schemes and free software?

I'm only able to describe my views about the license used for GIMP. There are more Free Software licenses around, but I do not know their specifics well enough to speculate about them.

I expect that the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), the license used to distribute GIMP, will be around for years or decades. It will evolve to accommodate to development, for example new distribution methods. This evolution must take the spirit of previous versions into account, because deviations which would violate its core principles would make

The GNU GPL covers the distributions to and the freedoms of the users, and prevents restrictions of usage.

Setting up subscription-based models would thus be tricky at best, even the GPL FAQ state that a subscription fee to control the use of Free software is not allowed:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SubscriptionFee

The GNU GPL makes it possible, however, to run software on your own servers and provide access to it, without distributing the software itself.

Right now, there are few SaaS models based on GIMP, http://www.flamingtext.com/Effects-Logos is the only one I know of. If this will become a more prominent use case for GIMP, we might want to make sure that any user of the service has got the same rights and freedoms as if they downloaded the current GIMP - for example, access to the source code of the GIMP version running as an image processing server.

Regards,
Michael