Re: [Gimp-developer] How much money to make a dent in GIMP 2.8?

[Jeremy Morton <admin game-point net>]

With all due respect, your method of not paying anyone has resulted in 2 
years without a stable release of GIMP.  What's your point?  It's not 
like things are just rosy and there aint nothing to fix.

--
Best regards,
Jeremy Morton (Jez)

On 05/03/2012 11:56, peter sikking wrote:
> Paul Slocum wrote:
>
> > I've been a serious professional GIMP user for about 10 years, but the
> > project has seem stalled for quite some time now.  I was wondering how
> > much money it would take to get the project back on track?  Would 25k,
> > 50k, 100k to hire one or two programmers for several months make a
> > substantial difference?
>
>
> can I point out a couple of things?
>
> first, it has been pointed out for years that that would
> build a two-class society in GIMP: paid and very active
> (and contribution is power in free software), vs. unpaid and
> occasional contributor (or more tragic, unpaid and steady
> contributor; how long would that last?)
>
> next, software engineering is only one single piece of the whole
> puzzle of shipping software. I have a lot of respect for the people
> who write the documentation; for the people who do triage in
> bugzilla; for those who run the SoC; for those who organise
> and do localisation; I probably forget some more who do similar
> hard, nagging work that involves quite a bit of managing
> processes. all of this is not seen as development,
> which is already a put-down for these people. add another one
> on top; that it would not speak for itself to pay to get
> this done?
>
> then there is my team, the UI team. and related, the people
> undertaking quite a bit of usability research at this moment.
> As a professional, I know what all that is worth, both in
> what it delivers to the project and what it costs in
> the real world: a substantial amount. all of this is
> contributed at the moment with the understanding that
> there is no money going around in GIMP (donations are
> used for travel to bring contributors together and for
> servers and hosting).
>
> I would not like to see that understanding being broken.
>
> the reason our (m+mi works) contribution of years to
> openPrinting came to an end, was that I realised
> that everyone was paid to contribute to open source
> printing (_no_one_ work voluntarily in printing) except
> for us, the interaction design team, who were dragging
> printing out of the 1980s (kicking and screaming).
> meanwhile there was a lot of pressure on us from these paid
> folks to make progress, but not a dollar to make it happen.
> then something snapped.
>
> I won't get fooled again. if there is money for the engineering
> of a project, then there better be real ($) appreciation of
> what interaction design is worth.
>
> my conclusion is to let pandora's box of paid development
> closed.
>
>      --ps
>
>          founder + principal interaction architect
>              man + machine interface works
>
>          http://blog.mmiworks.net: on interaction architecture
>
>
>
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