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hi Jim, I am not a code developer but a user, a researcher and, I like to think, user experience designer. So, please take my words with a grain of salt. 'Open source' is fundamentally different from 'for-profit'. No, really! :) A paradigm shift on economy, politic, social and management levels. It is sometimes hard for us to completely switch in our minds between the two and very often the learned 'commercial' side leaks in our 'open source' brains. I am repeatedly baffled why some open-source websites still use marketing lingo to describe their efforts, when a simple human language would do. But, hey, we are all learning and we will get it right, eventually. There might be some concepts you are familiar with. For example: market, customer, consumer, demand, warranty, proprietary, intellectual property, price, patent, production schedule, ... Those concepts do not translate in the open-source. But, open source offers some other concepts. Such as: freedom, openness, transparent, for fun, itch, modularity, activity driven, personal contribution, collaboration, fork, and many other concepts that matter to people. 'For-profit' paradigm is a paradigm of 'consumers'. 'Open-source' world is a paradigm of 'doers'. Consumers demand, pay and, well ... consume. The doers, do, contribute, create and initiate. Now, there is no market or competition GIMP or any other open source software has to put up against. So why cram everything inside? There are other projects that might perform the functions you need, and more often than not, you will find that your data is welcome in many of those. I would argue from my experience in User interaction, that featuritis is NOT just 'how you organize the features and plugins'. The Mix of functions you put in any software beyond the core ones is an endless debate. Always. 'Handy' for someone is 'full blown ridiculous' to someone else. For excellent ideas, you don't need abundunce. In fact, scarcity breeds mastery. There are numerous cases in music, art, design, science, engineering... I firmly believe that. But to someone else, this is just BS. The key-word here is 'workflow'. If a piece of software can integrate in your preferred workflow, it will work for you. Your 'excellent' workflow in GIMP might be just a nonsensical ritual to someone else and the other way around, and both of you will be right. I can see that you are active with GIMP Massive package. Your experience and insights in dealing with immense amount of plugins and addons might be a valuable contribution to user experience. From this experience, you might want to create an idea how to implement what you know would be a better way, or would like to see in GIMP, or some other future graphics project. The same factors that contribute to acceptance of some code, will contribute to the acceptance of your ideas. If your ideas are articulated, presented and clear enough, and just work for other people, (i.e. clearly indicate the 'excellence' of your approach) they will be created/implemented/improved somehow somewhere by someone. That's how open source works ;). Maybe I am painting an idealized picture, here? ... darktable is an admirable open-source effort to create a digital photography manager and RAW developer. It is a separate piece of software that might fit your workflow. You might find it roughly comparable (but not equivalent to!) Adobe Lightroom, silkyPix. If you have some time, please give it a try! Darktable comes among the top results if you google it. Unfortunately, I was not able to see the reference on Topaz address you provided. cheers, Alex On 11-11-29 16:37 , Jim Michaels wrote:
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