The Gimp project has been quite abrasive to the graphics research and software development communities for many years. The Gimp team 'knows better' then the highly qualified and experienced graphics programmers who offered to help the project bring there code base into the current standards for graphics.
There has been a lot of goodwill that has been squandered by the Gimp developers to the point that I seriously doubt that anyone with the skills or the time to work on OSS graphics is willing to invest any time in the project.
Any further development of Gimp will more then likely be an upgrade to the latest version of the GTK+ toolkit slapped on top of the same outdated 8bit early 1990's architecture fallowed by praise by people who have little experience or interest in graphics at any serious level.
I don't know much about those highly qualified graphics programmers - but every good project has a pace and a development plan - GIMP definitely has a roadmap in place, that can't and shouldn't be turned 180 degrees everytime someone comes with an idea; and I've seen quite a few people who see the rigors and the standards set in place as "abrasiveness"
Could you point us to some mailing list messages that would support the claim though? I don't follow the mailing list closely, mainly the news announcements.
The Gimp has been 'transitioning to GEGL' for how many years now? Something like six or seven years. And getting the data structures in place is only part of the challenge. How fast is this going to be for users? If the speed is to slow for users to efficiently get there work done at an intuitive pace then you have still failed.
From the initial GEGL integration attempts I saw the whole thing was hacked together with no clear thought to performance. And the performance was indeed quite abysmal.
Note: I've donated to Krita, GIMP, digiKam and other software, animation projects and libregraphics meetings in the past.
Unfortunately groups of humans act that way sometimes. Wouldn't it make sense for the more qualified and experienced graphics programmers to simply fork it and make their own better product?
A lot of people would like to work on a established project rather then bootstrap a new one. And many could not do that anyways because of NDA terms.
The climate is getting better but only because there is a new crop of applications that sprung up in the last few years that has more interest and understanding of who the graphics community is and how it works. And seems more interested in contributions by people who have highly specialized and deep expertise in graphics.
My general sense is that it has been more fruitful for people to work on specific projects privately or in there professional environment that solve there problems and then release those projects as OSS. Rather then try to wrangle the politics and project structure of some of the older established open source software.
I will say that the Gimp 'core rewrite' has been a project in development since the early 2000's. I have never seen a clear design document explaining what this new core is suppose to achieve and for what uses Gimp expects to be used by professional level Artists workflows.
The last development that I was paying attention to was the decision to switch to GEGL for there core compositing and pixel engine. But it looked like it would simply be easier and probably better to start from scratch and build an entirely new software build around a 32bit image architecture rather then try and retrofit there 8bit custom build compositing system.
I will also note that they decided to invest there limited resources into upgrading the gui from GTK2 to GTK3 rather then focus that energy on the core. That shows rather skewed priority focus for a software that has some serious issues.
Name one such programmer.
> Any further development of Gimp will more then likely be an upgrade to the latest version of the GTK+ toolkit slapped on top of the same outdated 8bit early 1990's architecture
8bit has been gone since 2012. Wake up and smells the floats :)
No, the problem was with Qt itself. The whole reason GTK was created, is because Qt wasn't really FOSS. Only much later Qt was really opened up. So yeah, today Qt is open and it's clearly much better. But the damage was already done, and the split happened.
"You should completely rewrite this project, consisting of hundreds of thousands of lines of code that people have worked on for years, using the tools I like better!"
Because that's pure gold.
It's mostly quite good and has very high feature parity. Although it can't resize a selected image portion and so i still use paint.net.
As an aside, I've tried Krita, but am too used to how things work in Gimp, particularly the shortcuts. How different is Paint.net?
Apples to oranges.
EDIT: I'm willing to give the GIMP a boost. I don't know this developer. Is someone knowledgable about this particular developer. Is it likely they are the right person to do it?
EDIT2: He's contributed a lot already for a long time and still keeps on going strong. It looks good to me.
The campaign is also listed here http://pippin.gimp.org/ - in the header.
So as long as the "pippin" user of https://www.patreon.com/pippin is the same as GIMP's pippin, it seems legit.
Also, can't you just position floating windows in the right place so that they look pretty much docked in-place?
Note that I don't have any OS X machines to confirm this myself, this was at a designer's mac a few weeks ago.
What do you find about Gimp that is hard to use?
Hubris. Ego. Not a shred of a clue about image editing. The entire batch of current systemic problems are a byproduct of this developer's efforts and architecture.
I feel the post really should be conveying what they will be providing if they reach their patreon marker. A better competitor to Photoshop, Paint.net. What features will be worked on, etc. Its gotta market itself in some way.
GIMP is free software and ethical. Paint.net is the same rental model that Photoshop is now using and is completely against the public interest for us to put our resources into that sort of business.
For anyone interested, the MIT-licensed source is still out there: https://github.com/rivy/OpenPDN
We're talking about http://www.getpaint.net, right? This is proprietary desktop software, but as far as I can tell, it is gratis. (They do solicit donations, but paying has no bearing on the license.)
Implying that non-free software is unethical? That's a rather rude thing to say.
* They rewrite the core of the software to allow a lot of new features.
* The developers could not agree on all critical details on how to proceed.
* Some developers got frustrated because things were not going their way or proceeding too slowly.
* The new model of how things work makes much of the old code obsolete.
* There are a lot of modules which need to be rewritten to use the new core.
* Before thinking about releasing the new GIMP >50% of the total work has to be done making transition hard.
* Due to its 'unique' interface a lot of people don't like the GIMP even if it would do everything they need.
* Designing and implementing a new interface is another pain point.
Considering that currently the GIMP is at a critical point in its development, a full-time developer could really be the pivotal element in making it succeed. I don't know much about this particular developer, though.
If you ever tried slipping a few line of code for a side-project or a free/open source one, you know how hard it is to focus when you have such limited time and energy.
After more then a decade of failed and failing software development and funding modes that tried to shoehorn artist driven intuitive graphics applications into a development model that tangentially works for lone wolf kernel device driver hackers we have started to overcome the damage and move in a positive direction with Krita, Natron, Blender Foundation etc.
The Gimp project and development model has not produced a productive environment or a compelling product for any of the groups I mentioned. That has been the case for many years. After a lot of hard work other projects have managed to formulate better more productive models to develop OSS graphics programs and find funding to do so. The artists are happier because they get better more competitive software and they are willing to fund its development. The programmers are happier because they have a clear direction and understanding of who there users are and where the software needs to go. And the researchers are happier because they see a community who is interested in and welcoming of new and useful graphics algorithms and research.
None of this has happened because of the Gimp. It has happened in spite of the Gimp project sucking most of the air out of the room for many years and contributing nothing to the OSS graphics community as a whole.
If you care about fostering the growth of OSS Graphics software and a community of talented Artists that feel comfortable and productive using OSS software then you need to promote the people and the projects that are making that happen.
The gimp project needs to take a break and perhaps hand the reigns over to a new group with a different vision. The current project and its structure, soliciting money form the Artist community into developers private patreon accounts with vague promises to make Gimp great again is not helping Gimp or the OSS graphics community.
Last time I checked, the GIMP was open source. If this group of fresh-bloods has a better vision, let them fork or start from scratch - there is simply no good reason to kill the current project. "Sucking up all the air" is just another way to say "it's difficult to compete with" - and blaming the GIMP project for that says more about the potential up-and-coming than GIMP. XFree86 didn't "suck most of the air out" of XServer market- x.org was just better, ditto OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice.
Oh I dunno. I see people doing excellent work with GIMP all the time. How about you?
> The gimp project needs to take a break and perhaps hand the reigns over to a new group with a different vision.
There is no "new group". There's just us.
Shortlist:
1. Hideously over-engineered pixel path makes performance, if at all possible, worse.
2. Broken concept of colour management and pixels. See sRGB debacle and the concept of hard coded spaces.
3. Anachronism of imaging model.
4. Ignored fundamental problems that many people pointed out years ago. See the ridiculous "unbounded mode" that even a 100 level image computer student could have demonstrated would never work.
5. As per 4., ignored all evidence and designed a worthless software model around.
Etc.
The project needs to die.
Look - irrespective of the truth of the message, remember that there are humans reading it and framing matters
Oh, let's!
http://ninedegreesbelow.com/files/linear-is-the-new-black.ht...
"LNB and CCE both allow the user to easily produce radiometrically correct editing results. LNB provides fewer user choices for blend modes and for various operations, but the defaults for the operations and blend modes that I've looked at are logical and useable."
LNB is the linear-is-the-new-black branch of upstream GIMP. CCE is her patched version.
