It’s been eight months now, but I doubt much has changed in the two horse and a dog town that is the GIMP.
1. Less time for GIMP development for key resources
I like to imagine these idiots sitting around the breakfast table every morning and asking each other “Who is going to be the key resource today?” “If it’s Tuesday, it must be Fido.”
2. Features are being developed on the main branch
Oh, well, then. That would be evil, wouldn’t it? We can’t have features being developed on the main branch. After all, we are all Professionals in the Land of Gimp.
3. A tendency among developers to repeatedly start working on new things
And there we have it.
Don’t bother getting old things right.
Concentrate on getting new things wrong.
It’s a bit of a paradigm, isn’t it?
Comments
Well, it is developed by about 2 people. You can’t expect them to do as good a job as Adobe.
In fact, IMO, what they have managed to do with GIMP is pretty amazing considering how many people are working on it. The problem is that it is advertised as a complete replacement for Adobe Photoshop by the Loons when it clearly isn’t (even the devs say that isn’t their intention).
Making fun of the GIMP is a bit like kicking a starving, stray puppy.
I never got why people are choosing the GIMP. You go into forums, and practically everyone has it. If i want to do sone basic image processing on my windows pc, i ‘ll download Paint.NET. If i ever want to do professional editing, i ll get Photoshop. GIMP is sort of no man‘s land, it doesnt have all the features professionals want, and it‘s hostile to the amateur, sometimes even more than photoshop.
PS: Gotta love the “work and marital situations of people change all the time“. Is it just me or “i just finished college and got a paying job“ is a common cause of death among many open source projects?
I can’t remember the details, but I thought GIMP was going through being rewritten from scratch or something.
What’s the difference between rewriting something from scratch and getting it right in the first place?
Oh, wait … no, I have no clue either.
It’s pretty sad since a decent design plan and tighter list of features could actually make a compelling product.
Photoshop is a big, heavy, complex application with tonnes of legacy cruft. There’s plenty of room for mid-range graphics tools, but GIMP foolishly set out to be the Photoshop killer, and it continues along this path, failing at every turn.
This is especially true when you consider the fact that the built in Paint program in Windows is terrible, and OSX doesn’t even have a built in paint program.
“GIMP foolishly set out to be the Photoshop killer, and it continues along this path, failing at every turn.”
Source? How did GIMP set out to be the Photoshop killer? I never remember the devs saying anything like that.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=gimp+the+photoshop+killer
Searching Google yields plenty of results where FOSS advocates claimed it would kill Photoshop or hurt Adobe. Others simply call it the “Open Source Photoshop”.
Regardless of how you look at it, GIMP is trying to be Photoshop. Rather than creating something original with a clear focus, they simply tried to make a blind copy, warts and all, and failed.
I think it goes back to the ManyEyes™ fallacy. I’m sure at some point early on, the original developers realized how ambitious the task was, but assumed thousands of developers would come out of the woodwork and somehow manage to organize themselves enough to topple Adobe.
Now, they only have 2.5 full time developers and virtually no contributors.
GIMP isn’t trying to be Photoshop. The developers have clarified that several times. Zealots may want it to be a GNU/Free Photoshop, but it isn’t, probably won’t ever be, and that’s not what the developers are aiming for.
Well why does it have such a convoluted UI then?
If they’re trying to make just another Paint.NET, then they need to greatly simplify things.
Even if the developers no longer want it to be Photoshop, they’re not doing anything interesting either. It’s still just a derivative app that has all the makings of Photoshop 2.0.
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