On Feb 25, 2004, at 10:35 am, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:Very well them,
Image manipulation is one of the key application areas that needs to be addressed for open source tools to become the mainstream desktop environment. I'm currently funding a number of different open source projects, and am considering funding work on the GIMP or CinePaint.
I can only speak for myself but being somewhat impressed by the GNOME bounty system, I'd like to recommend you the following to boot:
- Identify problem areas (talk to users, let usability experts speak up, etc.)
I think that regardless Mr. Shuttlework would choose to act on these lines, this is exactly the "talk to users and usability experts" stage. :-)
So, letīs try to make an objective time line of the GIMP, like had been outlined before, and try and guess what could be sped up if there were apropriate funding?
The GIMP 2.0 is getting out AnytimeNow(tm). After that, GIMP 2.2 with a lot of enhancements, but no changes on the bit depths (but according to what I've heard from the GEGL guys, with a little GEGL already in) should follow in 6 months or so.
An them, in about one year, which IMHO is optimistic seeing the pace for the 2.0 release, there would be a GIMP 3.0 whith full support to other bit depths and color spaces, due to full integration with GEGL.
That is about it that has been said around here, ain't it?
Now what to say? these timelines apply if most of us go working on our spare-times, with a few exceptions. Maybe with funding, more people could go fulltime/partime into the project, and say, speed up GEGL development and integration. I think this is what we could think about and tell Mr. Shuttleworth.
Also, he asked reasons to support GIMP rather than, or concurrently with, CinePaint. IMHO the GIMP interface has evolved more and better than CinePaint's. But I use that program too litle to know about all of it's features - and their's todo list posted here seemed ratehr impressive.
Also, the inner code of the GIMP is expected to be cleaner and easier to extend than CinePaint's. But I had not actually picked into their code.
Maybe mr. Shuttleworth would rather leave these steps to us - or to the Gimp Foundation(s).- Split up tasks in handleable subtasks - Set up a website specifying all taks and the possible money to get - Wait for people to show up and implement the tasks - Pay the money
The bounty is to be paid once the feature or solution has been successfully integrated into the main GIMP CVS repository and acknowledged by the maintainer(s).
This IMO works much better than any global funding where misc. people benefit
while others probably doing the more interesting jobs do not.
Servus, Daniel
Regards,
JS
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