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

[Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 12:01 AM, Kevin Cozens wrote:
> Someone wrote:
>>
>> So what kind of money do you think would it take to catch up?  Or to
>> at least make a significant step towards catching up?
>
>
> No amount of money will help if there is no one available with the skills,
> level of knowledge of GIMP's source code, and the time to work on the
> project. I think the people with enough knowledge of GIMP's internals and
> the who have the time to work on the project are already doing so.

I know at least one important contributor who expressed an interest in
doing paid development.

Starting paid development means changing a lot in how the project
works. I understand that the way things are going now seem easier to
everyone, because right now noone really takes a formal/written
responsibility for anything and would rather be happy to see this
state of affairs to continue.

Yes, part of the 2.8 issue is because we tried to do to many things at
once. But I don't really think that branch-based development is going
to cure everything.

We practically lost Enselic who was supposed to do all the
heavy-lifting in the final migration to GEGL and implement some of the
much desired hi-end features. What's been happening for last several
years is a loss of credibility for the project. We can only cure that
with that final switch. And only temporarily. Right now it looks like
it's still bloody years away.

If we can't organise the project in a way that developers come
themselves, then saying a strict "no" to paid development while
allowing GSoC (which _is_ paid development) seems silly to me.

That said, we haven't really done everything to attract new
developers, and I suggest that we start with tying loose ends:

- better intro docs
- more hackfests

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org