Re: GIMP Project

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Nelson Marques wrote:
>   I don't quite understand why GIMP Project on their website seems so
> distant from the open source community without any links to other
> projects such as GNOME, KDE or whatever. I would understand not having
> KDE, but not having a GNOME link is kinda lame hence they GNOME GTK
> toolkit.

It's historical. Actually, the GNOME project was an out-growth of the
GIMP - GTK+ was a GIMP project, and one of the founders of GNOME,
Federico Mena Quintero, was a GIMP developer and maintainer for several
years. GTK stands for "GIMP toolkit".

The GIMP decided not to depend on the GNOME platform for a number of
reasons (many related to performance issues and cross-platform
concerns), and so at one stage it was necessary for the GIMP developers
to affirm that the app was not a GNOME app, but was a GTK+ app. This
also avoided making waves with the Qt/KDE community.

The need for distinction has gradually eroded, I think. The GIMP still
does not depend on Gconf, libgnome, GNOME VFS (although I heard they
recently started to depend on gio/gvfs), but it is in some sense
spiritually a GNOME application.

If you want a link to gnome.org on the GIMP website, you should ask -
I'm sure there would be no problem with it, but they would also probably
put a link to kde.org too.

And I agree about being helpful. Careful though, some of the GIMP
developers can be a little prickly sometimes.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org