Erisian wrote:
!. When I got involved in the debate, my post was part of another thread in which it was said that thousands of dollars were being asked for. This sounds to me like a scam as I can't imagine any Gimp feature costing that much.
Oh dear... I'm facepalming all right, sir
First of all, about that money. Are you familiar with the concept of standard of living? People need a different amount of money to live on in different countries. The whole western CG industry is neck deep in problems, because there are cheap VFX houses in e.g. India, and few governments subsidize VFX contracts (USA doesn't, for instance). Jehan currently lives in New Zealand. It's not a cheap country.
Next, about the cost of developing features in GIMP. What with my limited imagination and all, I can't think of any other reason you said that other than because you've just descended to Earth from another planet where waving a hand in the air for, like, a few seconds produces 1bln lines of code, finetuned user experience and a total 0 of bugs. In that very case I could see why you can't imagine any feature costing that much. Here, on good ol' Earth, however, everything takes time and effort.
But here's a fun fact you could have known. Every GSoC student gets $5,000 for a successful project which is officially 3 months of work (but given all the work that needs to be done upfront, I'd say it's really more like 4 months). Since 2005 the GIMP team had maybe two dozens of students working in this program. Is that a scam as well?
And, hey, let's make it even more fun
If you think it's a scam, that you'll have to conclude that GIMP team are scammers as well. After all, wasn't the campaign promoted on gimp.org?
Erisian wrote:
I also can't imagine the core developers using something just because it has been paid for.
Alas, I have to repeat my question: where do you guys get these amusing notions about GIMP and its team?
be careful, you are bringing back an old notion of mine that many open source bods are pompous intellectual types who expect jack and jill to have umpteen degrees. Cut the sarcasm! I wasn't aware that Gimp was a commercial product and I wasn't aware that it's developers were full time and needed a living. I naively assumed they did it because they enjoy dong it. I apologise for not being perfect