Paul Slocum wrote:
> I've been a serious professional GIMP user for about 10 years, but the
> project has seem stalled for quite some time now. I was wondering how
> much money it would take to get the project back on track? Would 25k,
> 50k, 100k to hire one or two programmers for several months make a
> substantial difference?
can I point out a couple of things?
first, it has been pointed out for years that that would
build a two-class society in GIMP: paid and very active
(and contribution is power in free software), vs. unpaid and
occasional contributor (or more tragic, unpaid and steady
contributor; how long would that last?)
next, software engineering is only one single piece of the whole
puzzle of shipping software. I have a lot of respect for the people
who write the documentation; for the people who do triage in
bugzilla; for those who run the SoC; for those who organise
and do localisation; I probably forget some more who do similar
hard, nagging work that involves quite a bit of managing
processes. all of this is not seen as development,
which is already a put-down for these people. add another one
on top; that it would not speak for itself to pay to get
this done?
then there is my team, the UI team. and related, the people
undertaking quite a bit of usability research at this moment.
As a professional, I know what all that is worth, both in
what it delivers to the project and what it costs in
the real world: a substantial amount. all of this is
contributed at the moment with the understanding that
there is no money going around in GIMP (donations are
used for travel to bring contributors together and for
servers and hosting).
I would not like to see that understanding being broken.
the reason our (m+mi works) contribution of years to
openPrinting came to an end, was that I realised
that everyone was paid to contribute to open source
printing (_no_one_ work voluntarily in printing) except
for us, the interaction design team, who were dragging
printing out of the 1980s (kicking and screaming).
meanwhile there was a lot of pressure on us from these paid
folks to make progress, but not a dollar to make it happen.
then something snapped.
I won't get fooled again. if there is money for the engineering
of a project, then there better be real ($) appreciation of
what interaction design is worth.
my conclusion is to let pandora's box of paid development
closed.
--ps
founder + principal interaction architect
man + machine interface works
http://blog.mmiworks.net: on interaction architecture
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