Re: [Gimp-user] Funding a Microsoft developer

[Simon Budig <simon budig de>]

Steve Kinney (admin pilobilus net) wrote:
> I wonder if it would be a good thing to do a Kickstarter type of
> campaign, to raise money to hire a developer to work on integrating
> the GIMP with Microsoft platforms, or to put bounties on solutions
> for specific bugs/issues?

We had this discussion some time ago and decided against hiring
developers. In an ideal world it is supposed to be fun to work on the
Gimp, we want that people work on the Gimp because they are actually
fond of it and they identify with the project.

Also we don't want to have a hierarchical structure based on money. It
also would put us into the weird position of delegating "lower" tasks to
the paid slave - not really something I'd look forward to...

There is a notable exception: The Google Summer of Code is a great thing
to reach out to new people: It is helping students that want to
contribute to free software while also earning some money. The mentoring
project receives some funds and - more importantly - might gain new
developers sticking to the project. So if there is a student with some
windows experience and wants to tackle some windows specific warts, I'm
all for making it a GSoC project.

> There's a LOT of GIMP users running Microsoft operating systems and
> if they tossed in an average of just a few dollars each...

They really help better by donating this money either to the Gimp
project or to e.g. the libre graphics meeting, which is the coolest
conference I attend. Gimp is a project distributed worldwide, which
sometimes makes communication hard and development a lonely thing - LGM
is a huge motivation boost there.

Note that the Gimp project funds attendees to LGM, this also is true for
windows developers - we need to lure them into open source development
:)

Bye,
        Simon
-- 
              simon budig de              http://simon.budig.de/