I was digging archives related to this topic and got to this interesting post on funding GIMP by Mark Shuttleworth. Worth reading.
http://marc.info/?l=gimp-developer&m=107770842926523&w=2
Cheers
On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 11:00 AM, Siddhesh Poyarekar < siddhesh.poyarekar@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 10:56 PM, Rony gnulinuxist@gmail.com wrote:
Points well said. May I suggest that big FOSS based companies like RedHat etc. should step into this area of professional media software and come up with some rock solid, user friendly and agile software for the industry. They can provide professional support for the same to big studios and the smaller ones can get the free-of-brand versions for free. Then they can promote the same in colleges and universities, along with training infrastructure. Students going into the industry should go with first hand knowledge of such software.
Companies do not contribute code to Free Software merely out of goodwill. They do it only if they feel that their business can actually gain something out of it. So it does not make sense to expect companies like Red Hat, Novell, etc. to pitch in to improve this -- they have no stake in it, no expertise and hence have no motivation or means to contribute. Multimedia companies on the other hand are a different thing altogether. Maybe some printing house that uses gimp heavily can hire a couple of developers to implement features that they want, and have them pushed upstream. There you have means and motivation since they already have a talent pool that actually *gets* graphics.
-- Siddhesh Poyarekar http://siddhesh.in -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers