[HN Gopher] Krita fund has no corporate support
___________________________________________________________________
Krita fund has no corporate support
Author : moelf
Score : 276 points
Date : 2023-10-05 11:38 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fund.krita.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (fund.krita.org)
| srmarm wrote:
| Is one of their top 3 supporters, the Titanium level 'User
| Manuals' just paying for a good backlink?
| moelf wrote:
| I think they could be drawing those menus with Krita
| superwalker wrote:
| [dead]
| lars_francke wrote:
| I want someone to build this:
|
| SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) are slowly becoming ubiquitus
| around the world due to regulation.
|
| I want to be able to aggregate all SBOMs within my company, have
| a small tool that scans my machine and creates a SBOM for all
| Open Source tools I use (e.g. Firefox, VLC etc.), uploads that to
| my corporate registry.
|
| This data is then submitted to a donation aggregator which
| analyzes those SBOMs and distributes my monthly donation across
| all those projects.
|
| It is so hard dealing with those individual donor portals and
| various forms to donate to foundations et. al.
|
| If this whole project could be run as a non-profit foundation
| itself that'd be perfect.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I think the devil is in the details. As others have pointed
| out, this would drastically change the incentive structure of
| OSS. You would attract actors whose entire purpose would be to
| get listed on as many SBOMs as possible to maximize their
| revenue potential. I'm envisioning a world of `padLeft`
| controversies.
|
| That is to say, I don't think a pure "frequency of use" metric
| is sufficient to fairly distribute such a pool. And if you have
| a large and growing pool of available money then the incentive
| to game the distribution scheme becomes more attractive than
| making truly awesome software. And I very much doubt that we
| have any reliable ways of aligning such a money distribution
| scheme with the goal of creating amazing software.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder if it would be enough to just recursively pay out to
| each dependency.
|
| You pick a % to keep and a % to pass along to each of your
| your dependencies, and then they split up that % that you
| passed along to them, so on and so forth.
|
| Of course people could choose to pass 0% along to their
| dependencies. But that seems fine; people can adjust and just
| not send greedy projects a very big split.
|
| Trying to enforce some fairness on the outside will probably
| just result in silly behavior from greedy people (ie, if
| every project gets an equal split out and somebody doesn't
| want to hand any money down to their dependencies, then they
| can just create a bunch of tiny projects to dilute their out-
| split).
| Clamchop wrote:
| Only enumerate and pay for top-level tools and dependencies,
| none of which are probably padLeft. Those downstream
| recipients can further "pay it forward" to their top-level
| dependencies. Everyone has an incentive to not pull in
| superfluous bullshit so they can hold onto as much of their
| pitance as possible.
|
| Trickle down economics? Ronald, is that you?
| orblivion wrote:
| `padLeft` can't just inject itself into a software stack
| right? So there's an incentive to be valuable enough to be
| included.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| Depends on how you do the accounting. "Well, you don't use
| padLeft, but 15 packages you depend on do, and 68 packages
| tjat those packages depend on do... Altogether you're
| looking at 348 instances of padLeft."
| orblivion wrote:
| If there were a metric that would make each instance of
| padLeft worth a tiny amount of money (for such a tiny
| library), that sounds like a reasonable outcome to me.
|
| EDIT: I may be missing part of the point
| bee_rider wrote:
| A trivial way to exploit this kind of system, I think,
| would be to write LegitimatelyUsefulLibrary, then write
| 1,000 PadLeft projects, and make
| LegitimatelyUsefulLibrary depend on all of them.
|
| Since you are the one marking the dependency of
| LegitimatelyUsefulLibrary on your PadLeft projects, you
| can game the metrics however you'd like when making it.
| mufeedvh wrote:
| I have made a simple CLI utility[0] with this purpose in mind.
| It scans your entire filesystem for README.md and FUNDING.yml
| files for a set of donation/sponsor links and tag it with the
| associated repo (No HTTP calls, just the assumption that most
| repos link their support URL in either of these files). The
| output is a CSV sheet containing the open-source
| dependencies/libraries you use in your system that accepts
| donations.
|
| I have plans to expand/plug this into a donation aggregator
| platform like you mentioned if time permits. But if there is an
| existing effort for the same, I am happy to contribute. :)
|
| [0] - https://github.com/mufeedvh/paydept
| bsima wrote:
| Hey this is pretty great, and the code is so simple. I guess
| it only works if you have the sources checked out somewhere,
| which isn't the case for all build tooling and package
| managers, but I could see an extended version of this that
| hooks into the standard package managers to fetch the
| required information to complete the report.
|
| If you can also hook into an accounting system (eg
| plaintextaccounting.org) then you could also calculate the
| whole dollar amounts to donate as some percentage of income
| from the product.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > I want to be able to aggregate all SBOMs within my company,
| have a small tool that scans my machine and creates a SBOM for
| all Open Source tools I use (e.g. Firefox, VLC etc.), uploads
| that to my corporate registry.
|
| Then your boss will come and ask WTF do you use VLC for when
| all the videos are on the web, also some default media player
| comes with your OS and by the way, you are not supposed to
| watch videos during your work day.
| Spivak wrote:
| Wild, I should be more appreciative that I have Steam on my
| work laptop and have played Slay The Spire during deploys
| with management on the call commenting on my game.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Slay the spire seems like time be a great game to play in
| the gaps between tasks.
| lars_francke wrote:
| It's my company. Apart from that: VLC was just one example.
| But it's a tool that a chunk of employed people actually need
| for work.
| Uehreka wrote:
| I think the idea here is more like "donate $1000/mo, have it
| distributed across the projects" rather than, say, "donate
| $10 to each project in the list."
| HPsquared wrote:
| This ties in with the other thread about aircraft parts and the
| chain of custody. "Who has touched and signed off on each piece
| of code"
| arp242 wrote:
| thanks.dev does this. I think I saw GitHub Sponsors also
| started (or will start?) doing something like this, but I'm not
| sure on the details off-hand.
|
| But yeah, I've argued for this a long time as well: who is
| going to look up 100 to 2,000 dependencies and see if they
| accept donations and set that up and cancel when you stop using
| it, add new ones when you start using them (and many will be
| transitive deps, so you have to check if it changed every month
| or something), etc. etc.
|
| You just want to give one organisation $500/month or whatever
| and let them sort it out. You don't even need SBOMs, just start
| by sending them your go.mod or package.json or Cargo.toml or
| Gemfile or whatever.
|
| That the FSF and OSI are doing basically nothing in this regard
| is why I have trouble taking either organisation serious.
| jamietanna wrote:
| See also https://stackaid.us as another platform doing
| similar
| evntdrvn wrote:
| Isn't this kinda what Tidelift is trying to do?
| arp242 wrote:
| I tried to sign up (as a maintainer) and I never heard back
| from them. Tidelift also does a lot of other stuff; my
| impression is they want to have a "curated list" of
| packages (Or something? I find Tidelift confusing) which is
| fine I guess, but not really a general solution.
| rendaw wrote:
| And I started https://bre.ad/ which does similar! I was
| trying to figure out a way to attract people slowly while I
| iron out issues...
| lars_francke wrote:
| We are using thanks.dev (to donate) and they are doing a tiny
| bit of it, but I have not seen much happening there in the
| past few months.
|
| Just sending go.mod etc. only looks at the software in the
| build process which doesn't go far enough.
|
| But I think we're on the same page!
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Say more about this SBOM regulation. Do you have an EN standard
| or something you can point me to?
| tapoxi wrote:
| https://cyclonedx.org/
| kevinherron wrote:
| It's mostly a recommendation from what I've seen so far, but
| it's not hard to read this as a future requirement.
|
| CISA has been pushing it, which his my why it's on my radar:
| https://www.cisa.gov/sbom
| Cerium wrote:
| FDA wants electronic SBOM for future device approvals.
|
| https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/digital-health-center-
| ex...
| lars_francke wrote:
| As others have already commented:
|
| The US government has added SBOMs to a proposed rule to
| update the Federal Acquisition Regulation. So if you want to
| sell to the US Government you'll have to provide SBOMs: https
| ://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/03/2023-21...
|
| Lots of large companies require SBOMs from their supplier.
|
| In the EU we will get the Cyber Resilience Act which will
| make them mandatory as well in certain cases: https://data.co
| nsilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12536-2023-...
|
| And yes, there's bascially two technical standards to provide
| them: SPDX and CycloneDX: https://cyclonedx.org/
| catapart wrote:
| Love that idea!
| oaiey wrote:
| First: I also need that. It is a pain right now. Second: it
| would be a good way to rationalize to your managers on how
| shaky grounds they stand.
| martypitt wrote:
| I've been toying with an idea of some kind of "Spotify for OSS"
| kinda thing - where software authors can make their binaries
| available, provided you have an active subscription (with the
| Spotify for OSS service).
|
| Funds are then distributed based on usage (trackable at the
| package registry).
|
| The idea being corporates buy a single license per head, rather
| than dealing with lots of donations etc.
|
| Probably lots of reasons it wouldn't work, but it's a fun
| thought experiment.
| Woshiwuja wrote:
| It's a good idea but that would mean companies now have to
| pay. And they don't like it. (unless is for useless shit
| nobody cares about that doesnt make your job easier, they got
| loads for that)
| bee_rider wrote:
| This seems like an easy way for people to accidentally change
| the nature of their projects from a personal hobby/community
| type thing to something more like a customer service type
| relationship, which brings a bunch of expectations regarding
| fitness and merchantability.
| phkahler wrote:
| The more infrastructure built to fund a cause, the lower the
| percentage of the money actually funding people on the ground
| doing the work. This is often true of charities. OTOH there
| will be more money, and maybe some of the people actually doing
| the work can actually make a living doing so.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| You need to audit the places it's being donated to. Do they
| actually spend it on making the software you depend on better
| and paying the people making the software. Or is it a
| Processing Foundation situation
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37760363
| q0uaur wrote:
| I was also disappointed to see them using a KDE account for
| donations. I like KDE but i'm pretty sure there's tons of krita
| users who do not use kde, me included.
|
| Found that there is a Krita on liberapay, which i much prefer
| as platform, but who knows if that's official or not, since
| it's not linked on this thread's link.
| pxc wrote:
| If you're using Krita, you're a KDE user because Krita is a
| KDE project. The Plasma desktop environment is just another
| KDE project.
| sho_hn wrote:
| KDE is a community of developers that makes various software
| products, including Krita - that's why there's a KDE account
| involved here, since KDE makes Krita :-)
|
| Many of those software projects available even for commercial
| systems like Windows and Mac OS, and of course the various
| free software environments. Those users are all equally
| important, so there's no conflict there.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I haven't used Windows in ages, but when I did, kate worked
| very well on it.
| itomato wrote:
| You get this upstream as part of the system inventory and
| manage the delta with your change management
| RockyMcNuts wrote:
| same for news and blogs ... pay $10 per month, get paywall
| access, browser tracks what you read and distributes to
| authors. open source version of Apple news that actually
| supports local news and indies without extracting a giant
| additional vig.
| hinkley wrote:
| I would settle for something much simpler.
|
| All of your engineers get 5,10 votes for important libraries
| they use. The vote history is aggregated, and voting is twice a
| year. For every N votes we send $100 to that project. That way
| you're not cutting little checks, and you have a finite number
| of projects you have to hunt down funding contacts and
| charitable status for.
|
| Due to aggregation across votes, all the projects that
| perpetually come in 10th to 20th place get paid every year or
| two, and first place is likely to see a little more money each
| year. $300 in June and $400 in December for instance.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| A "clearing house" for donations would be pretty neat
| zorrotorro wrote:
| Don't take this the wrong way but corporate are such prima
| donnas!
|
| I got flashbacks from my tiny startup days when corporate went
| to procurement companies which wanted specific terms and mode
| of payment. And after all the infrastructure was in place...
| they basically spent no money!
|
| The SBOM idea exists in various forms. Few need it and few use
| it.
|
| If somebody wants to pay money, they will figure out a way. If
| they want to invent an excuse they will find one.
| lars_francke wrote:
| > Don't take this the wrong way but corporate are such prima
| donnas!
|
| Not taking it the wrong way, you're right :)
|
| > I got flashbacks from my tiny startup days when corporate
| went to procurement companies which wanted specific terms and
| mode of payment. And after all the infrastructure was in
| place... they basically spent no money!
|
| Yep, that's painful but I count it as the cost of doing
| business. If I jump through these hoops and my competition
| doesn't it sets me apart. If only 1 in 10 then spent money so
| be it.
|
| > The SBOM idea exists in various forms. Few need it and few
| use it.
|
| True today. Not true tomorrow. Software development will
| become a highly regulated industry. This is my prediction at
| least.
|
| > If somebody wants to pay money, they will figure out a way.
| If they want to invent an excuse they will find one.
|
| I want to give them fewer excuses.
| digging wrote:
| > If somebody wants to pay money, they will figure out a way.
| If they want to invent an excuse they will find one.
|
| I think this is just not true. Reducing friction will
| increase participation.
|
| I make donations to many organizations currently. I would
| donate to more, but it's a hassle to identify them and
| determine what/how I want to donate. It's just not a top
| priority for me, for better or worse. But if I could click a
| button right now and 5x my donations with the trust that they
| were supporting what I wanted them to, I'd do it!
|
| edit: Also, this is a reminder to me that everything is a
| choice and I could be spending my time setting up donations
| instead of commenting on HN...
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I read this several times and I have no idea what benefit this
| would serve or anything about it.
| lars_francke wrote:
| Let's say I want to make sure to donate to ALL open source
| projects I use in my company. Those in my builds as well as
| those used on our computers that are not build dependencies
| (e.g. Firefox, vim, Linux, ...).
|
| How do I do that today? I collect a list of that software and
| contact hundreds of individual people and organizations,
| figure out the donation processes, fill out forms, transfer
| money etc.
|
| I want this to be automated. I want this automation to build
| upon existing standards.
|
| Does that help?
| carapace wrote:
| This proposal would lead (I suspect) to "enshittification"
| of the supply chain as people wrangled to be larger
| portions of the dependency/payment tree, eh?
|
| Part of what makes FOSS work at all is that the motivation
| is not _profit_ but _benefit_.
| snarfed wrote:
| This is https://tidelift.com/ ! Others too, I think.
| lars_francke wrote:
| No, that's something different.
|
| They used to be simple to understand, looking at their
| homepage today I have no idea what they are doing today but
| not what I'm looking for.
| moralestapia wrote:
| "Contact us for a quote"
|
| Any idea how much that is?
| placesalt wrote:
| About 10-20 minutes of your time, if you include the task-
| switching cost.
| [deleted]
| phone8675309 wrote:
| No, but I bet if you contact them that they can give you
| one.
| jandrese wrote:
| But then you have to waste a salesguy's time generating a
| quote for a product that I'm not likely to purchase. I
| hate doing that. I'm basically stealing from them just
| because I'm trying to shop around for the best product.
| I'm calling salesguys and giving all of them my
| information and getting several different quotes, but I'm
| only going to execute on one of them. And now they're
| spamming my inbox every time their company does something
| even though I've never bought anything from them.
| bbarnett wrote:
| 1) Use a throwaway email for that quote
|
| 2) Write up what you want, and email ALL the companies
| you want a quote from... CCing them all in the same
| email.
|
| Make sure to indicate a close date for them "and all
| other possible bidders" to submit by.
|
| Now they all know who their competitors are, AND, they
| know there could be other, extra competitors, AND they
| know to price as competitively as possible.
|
| The sales people at the other end, and the company, will
| know if they want to "waste their time or not".
|
| This works well with car dealers too. If you want the
| best price on a specific make and model with specific
| options, send to the 10 dealers in a 2 hour drive radius.
| jandrese wrote:
| I wonder if this is one reason many companies have web
| forms to request the quote. So you can't mass email for
| them.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| So you'd rather someone else subject themselves to that
| for your own benefit than do it yourself?
|
| Seems kind of selfish, does it not?
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm sorry I don't understand. The alternative was to have
| a basic price for the product or service on their website
| that a person could look up.
|
| Maybe if I'm some big bulk buyer and think I can get a
| better deal by talking to the salesguy then I'll do that.
| But if I'm some small fry buying like 1 or 2 of the
| things I know they aren't going to give me a break, but I
| still have to go through the "contact the sales person,
| they call you back, you explain what you want, they
| generate a quote within 5-7 business days that is good
| for 30 days after being generated, you end up not buying
| the thing for whatever reason" rigamarole.
|
| Sidenote: I've never had a vendor balk at me using an
| "expired" quote to buy something. Our purchasing process
| never proceeds within 30 days, but turns out the prices
| don't change either. It is very common to be executing on
| a quote that's 6 months old.
| chpatrick wrote:
| The reason they make you do this is because different
| companies pay orders of magnitude different amounts for
| services like this.
| Karunamon wrote:
| No pricing info, no easily accessible demo, government
| agency logos on the landing page.
|
| This is setting off all of my "enterprise trash software"
| alarms. And if there is one thing those all have in common,
| it's being way too expensive.
| rdl wrote:
| Not just in billing, but also in implementation cost and
| general overhead. I actively avoid buying anything which
| requires talking to a salesperson to get basic service
| info; ideally one has something like the Cloudflare self-
| service model with enterprise upgrades. I know someone
| currently paying >$800k/yr to Cloudflare who started out
| a couple years ago with a $200/mo plan.
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| According to web.archive.org they had their 'starter'
| subscription priced at $30,000/year for 50 developers as of
| December 18th, 2022.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Whoa, that's very likely _way_ more than what these
| organizations spend supporting OSS, lol.
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| Well this is designed for enumerating supply chains in a
| strict compliance focused environment, not necessarily
| for giving back to said supply chain.
| [deleted]
| hedora wrote:
| I'm hoping "cargo vet"'s approach to supply chain security
| becomes standard practice:
|
| https://mozilla.github.io/cargo-vet/
|
| Adding a "pay upstream" feature to it would probably be minimal
| incremental effort. Someone is already supposed to pay the
| third-party auditors, after all.
| yuukisenshi wrote:
| The problem here to me is that Krita is simply a mess.
|
| Krita is supposedly part of the KDE project, which is committed
| to switching to wayland, but has 0 wayland support. In practice,
| that means that if you use other input devices they can have bugs
| that make it unusable.
|
| So it's Linux story is weak. A very bad start for a KDE app...but
| at least maybe on Windows it works well.
|
| Well the problem then is it does the classic blender thing of
| having non standard shortcuts and usage modes, except unlike
| blender it does so for literally no reason. Buttons in most of
| these programs, for certain classes of operations are
| standardized, and Krita just works differently for the fun of it.
| No justifications, just "spend a long time changing it if you
| want it different."
|
| The icons are also incredibly ugly and people get defensive about
| them. The QT thememing is fine, but the actual icons for brushes
| and the like look amateurish at best and really brings down the
| cohesiveness of the program.
|
| Certain tools are also abysmal to use. The text tool is a joke.
| Then you have certain operations being incredibly slow.
|
| I have worked as a professional artist for years. People here
| really seem to be implying photoshop is the "big dog" in the
| space, but this simply isn't true. I see far more CSP users than
| Photoshop users and among my coworkers and haven't used photoshop
| for anything but some post processing for years. Krita then needs
| to compete with CSP, and Procreate (which has gotten huge
| recently.) To be frank, it doesn't. CSP works mediocorely with
| Wine but because the input problems don't exist that exist with
| Krita I have taken to using that on Linux ironically because I
| use KDE. Krita is basically a non option for me at this point and
| has me considering making a GPU accelerated open source drawing
| app instead of suffering this current atrocious landscape.
| danShumway wrote:
| I don't have a huge amount of experience with Krita's Wayland
| performance because the situation on Wayland is still sub-
| optimal for art in general. Tablet support has gotten much
| better, but configuration per-app or tied to the desktop
| environment still seems to be a big issue. The idea that my
| tablet configuration might stop working if I switch off of a
| desktop environment is kind of a non-starter to me. It stinks
| because I really want to use Wayland, but even as recently as a
| month ago I tried to see if I could make the switch and
| couldn't.
|
| Truthfully, if someone has a lot of money to dump around,
| devoting a few full-time developers or dropping cash on
| https://github.com/OpenTabletDriver/OpenTabletDriver would
| probably go a long way towards encouraging Wayland adoption
| from artists.
|
| As far as I can tell the issue is not that Wayland _can 't_ do
| tablet control on the same level as X11, it's that the tools
| built around those capabilities still seem immature.
| OpenTabletDriver looks very promising but seems to have limited
| device support, limited in no small part by what tablets the
| devs have access to (my Cintiq 32 is unlikely to get added any
| time soon because it is no longer being sold and was expensive
| and uncommon when it was on the market -- which probably means
| I should try to do it, but it's been tough to find the time).
|
| The NVIDIA situation is also a problem, but there's nothing
| anyone can do about that other than yell at NVIDIA more.
|
| ----
|
| > The text tool is a joke.
|
| The text tool should see considerable improvement soon; the
| entire text engine got rewritten in the last release, the devs
| just only had time to get it to feature parity with the
| existing tools.
| yuukisenshi wrote:
| I'm willing to deal with the Linuxisms of being on Linux
| (wayland having bad tablet support and controls, I agree with
| you!) but the fact that on top of that Krita works
| particularly bad on KDE's default setup, whereas using CSP
| with Wine is a better experience is absurdity to me.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Krita has issues with X too. Using X11/libinput touchpad:
| pinch-to-zoom doesn't work in Krita but does work in KDE's ms
| paint clone Kolourpaint.
|
| I've also found Krita to be unsatisfactory for drawing pixel
| art. Select the pixel art brush and set it to be 3px wide, then
| draw a rectangle with the rectangle tool. This creates a
| rectangle with inexplicably jagged edges
| (http://0x0.st/HWyi.jpg). Turn off sharpness for the brush and
| try again, it _seems_ to work now but selecting the background
| color with the similar color selection tool will reveal that
| the jagged edges are still present but very faint
| (http://0x0.st/HWyz.jpg). All of this happens with a 3px brush
| but not a 2px brush. It's bizarre. I suppose most digital
| painters don't notice/care about this, but it's a deal breaker
| for me.
|
| I dislike the Krita icons as well. I would like colorful icons
| so my eyes can scan them quickly but some halfwit designer got
| it in their head that all the icons should be monochrome and
| there doesn't seem to be any way I can choose or create other
| icon themes.
|
| I really want to like Krita, but it just doesn't work with me.
| All I really want is "MS Paint but with layers" but that's
| evidently too much to ask on Linux. I've tried more than a
| dozen painting programs and they're all disappointing.
| yuukisenshi wrote:
| Same. I'm just using Windows programs now with wine that
| aren't 100% there, but closer than anything Linux native I
| have found.
|
| The exception is for pixel art, Aseprite works fine for me.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/88N1QKd
|
| Example of it on Linux with a decent theme.
| exabrial wrote:
| This looks like a really neat project... But on the homepage it
| does say, Intel is a gold corporate sponsor? Look, I don't have a
| horse in the race, but that is kind of silly :)
| fluoridation wrote:
| They must have pulled out recently enough that they haven't had
| time to update that image. On https://fund.krita.org/ (which is
| where the image links to) Intel is not listed on any of the
| tiers.
| pavon wrote:
| At my workplace a common theme is that folks that use a piece of
| software heavily as part of their job use the big professional
| tools both because it is worth paying more for a better tool
| considering how much value they get out of it, and because it
| aids in collaborating for everyone to use the same tools.
|
| People who only use a tool occasionally are the ones using
| Paint.net, Krita, Inkspace, Audacity, etc. Part of that is to
| save money, but a much bigger part is that it's too much hassle
| to go through procurement when it isn't absolutely necessary.
| More hours would be spent paying for the tool then would be spent
| using it.
|
| That makes it a hard sell to get corporate donations. From the
| corporate perspective, the tool is completely off their radar
| because their employees are using it to intentionally bypass
| corporate bureaucracy.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > From the corporate perspective, the tool is completely off
| their radar because their employees are using it to
| intentionally bypass corporate bureaucracy.
|
| If something is priced cheaply enough to be paid for out of
| pocket by an "individual contributor," but for a work purpose,
| that's a big deal.
|
| The bigger takeaway is that all seemingly B2B software is still
| B2C in disguise.
|
| On the other hand, the kind, smart people making Krita aren't
| in it to run a sales pipeline. Like even if the diehard,
| nonparticipating libertarian rationalists are right, if it's
| true that every person on Earth would happily be a billionaire,
| most people think _sales_ isn 't fun or meaningful.
|
| If you want to make the world more meaningful in your own way,
| I appreciate that the limit of fundraising to that goal is
| donations.
| Liquix wrote:
| Absolutely. But sometimes the best in class tool is open source
| (see: ffmpeg), resulting in a win-win-win for the accounting
| department, for the developer freed from bureaucracy, and for
| open source as a whole. It would be nice to live in a world
| where this was the case more often.
| stratigos wrote:
| I love Krita! ;-) Happy to send em $5
| catapart wrote:
| I like Krita's development ethos, but I really can't use the
| product at all. If I want software that doesn't respect my
| intentions, but provides the kitchen sink for functionality, I
| can find that better represented and supported in Adobe,
| Paint.Net, Paint Tool Sai; and those are just the raster
| comparisons. I honestly can't wait until design tools figure out
| what year it is and start developing blue-sky versions that work
| with multiple devices and accounts, simultaneously, to provide
| honed experiences for specific project work. I can't say I blame
| the lack of corporate sponsors, because I wouldn't - as an
| organization - find utility in the product.
|
| That said, it's still a shame! Seems like there would be someone
| out there with similar interests. I hope this post, or whatever
| else, helps evangelize this as a problem!
| actionfromafar wrote:
| How would a new solution respect your intentions?
| catapart wrote:
| It would implement features specific to and invaluable for
| whatever I'm intending to work on, in such a way that I would
| feel like trying to do it any other way would be wasting my
| own time.
|
| For an example, Clip Studio Paint - a tool unabashedly
| designed for and advertised to comic artists - has a design
| concept of a 'comic panel'. This lets you drag out a panel,
| instead of an arbitrary shape that you will use AS a panel.
| The panel, also an arbitrary shape, comes with functionality
| like "bleed" which allows you to continue drawing outside of
| the panel, but will truncate that content when you de-select
| the panel. It includes concepts like "path rendered borders"
| so that you can do weird stuff with borders that you wouldn't
| want to do with an arbitrary shape (like have characters
| break through them).
|
| So, you end up with a nice little feature that can ABSOLUTELY
| be recreated in other programs. Nothing in that "panel"
| feature couldn't be done with a series of steps and possibly
| some macros in other applications. The problem is, it's all
| of that setup (wasting my time) instead of just having the
| feature available because it's a well-known process with
| well-known problems. These are the people who are best suited
| to know what good processes look like, and can build the best
| kinds of tools for those well-known processes. Of course,
| they have to keep up to date, but that's any software in any
| industry.
|
| Just to head off any assumption that I prefer CSP or
| something, I will say that they fall woefully behind on other
| stuff that is not comic related (understandable because of
| their history, but still a hindrance to me using it). That
| aside, a separate example is that every single drawing
| program should have the ability for you to move "tool
| settings" onto another device. No question. I should be able
| to work from my tablet, and pick colors on my phone. Or work
| from my desktop and change brushes or sizes or store values
| from one project, while I open the next desktop tab for a
| different project, all on my second screen. As far as I know,
| none of them do this.
|
| The overall point being "We've designed apps to work with
| data like a computer uses that data. I would like it if we
| started designing apps that work with data however they have
| to in order for humans to work with 'concepts' in whichever
| way they understand those concepts (to the best of their
| ability, which is pretty able these days)."
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >to provide honed experiences for specific project work
|
| You need someone to lead that charge first. And that someone
| needs to understand each format and likely pay some programmer
| for a long time to make and more importantly, polish, such a
| feature. Open source is notoriously weak at polishing, so
| payment seems inevitable to keeop interest.
|
| When you are considering support for multiple devices you
| multiply said effort. Stylus vs touch screen controls are a
| different set of UX if you want it to be polished.
| raincole wrote:
| I'm migrating from Krita to Photoshop lately.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I love Krita. I used it for years and I wrote
| ~30+ bug reports. It's a positive thing -- I won't bother
| reporting bugs to Adobe cause I know they don't care, unlike
| Krita devs.
|
| However every time I need to collaborate with someone else, they
| use Photoshop. They use .psd like it's an interchangeable
| format[1]. Out of 10+ artists I've only seen one who doesn't use
| PS, and it's not Krita.
|
| [1]: I know Krita can read and write .psd.
| Kelteseth wrote:
| Why not Affinity Designer/Photo?
| raincole wrote:
| Perhaps it's a just me, but I've never met someone who uses
| Affinity Photo as their main digital painting app. The one
| artist who doesn't use PS actually uses Clip Studio Paint.
|
| I'm not saying it's not a great app (I'm not familiar with it
| enough to judge it). But if I'm not using an open source one,
| I'd use the industry standard one.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| I'm not a real artist. I do programmer art for game jams,
| MVPs, UI mockups, etc. I always liked Affinity Designer on
| iPad for that. It's got nice Apple Pencil support, it was
| inexpensive, and it works with other file formats pretty
| well.
|
| Last time they had a sale on their "Universal" bundle,
| which got you Mac, Windows and iPad licenses for all their
| products for $100, I had just received some illustrator
| files that I wanted to work with on my desktop and decided
| to go ahead and pick that up.
|
| I now find myself using Photo and Designer instead of
| Krita/Gimp and Inkscape, because I'm more efficient with it
| as a non-expert user and because the .psd and .ai interop
| is better.
|
| I need to deal with one of those two file types
| approximately 0.75 times a month, so the industry standard
| one feels eye-wateringly expensive. But a one-time $100 fee
| for a less frustrating experience than the open source ones
| offered felt worthwhile to me. And they've grown on me to
| the point that I pick them up when I need to make something
| for a game jam, not just when I need the interop.
| 7moritz7 wrote:
| The Affinity Suite has substantially better UIs than the
| Adobe pendants. It just works immidiately without
| tutorials, and it works really well
| egypturnash wrote:
| I am a pro artist. Most of my artist friends who don't use
| Photoshop either use Clip Studio or Procreate. In general
| the Clip/Procreate split corresponds strongly to whether or
| not they do a lot of comics.
|
| There's a handful of other programs that one or two of my
| friends use but absolutely zero of my friends have talked
| about using Affinity Photo.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| What kind of work do you do? The primary use case for Krita is
| digital painting, where _a lot_ of artists use CSP /Procreate
| and typical pipelines allow certain freedom of choice. I used
| to work with 2D artists, and perfect PS compatibility was a
| deal breaker everywhere except for digital painting.
| yuukisenshi wrote:
| What industry? I am involved in the game and illustration
| industry, and work with mostly eastern studios. I have seen a
| 90% CSP usage rate, with the last 10% mostly being procreate
| users. Photoshop is in usage to the same degree as Paint Tool
| Sai and I have never seen a Krita user.
| catapart wrote:
| I feel this pain. Photoshop is such a massive beast and really
| doesn't do anything for me that other programs don't. It's just
| too ubiquitous to work around without literally budgeting in
| your hours for having to work around it. -_-
| borbtactics wrote:
| Same here. I want a Photoshop alternative that has built-in
| tate-chu-yoko but I've never seen one
| catapart wrote:
| Perfect example of something that most people will think of
| as "not necessary", but a whole industry will understand as
| close to, if not outright, a deal-breaker!
|
| It would be really cool to have some kind of open source
| community that developed these kinds of "usage specific"
| plugins across multiple open-source projects, to kind of
| patch in that functionality where it's missing. Some people
| to work on ever-evolving interfaces for the supported
| applications, and then some other people to write plugins
| that provided these features, progressively enhanced, based
| on those interfaces.
|
| It would be a gargantuan effort, though, and you would just
| end up with a plugin soup without careful moderation (even
| more effort; and easy to go awry!) so c'est la vie!
| danjc wrote:
| Seems that a near-perfect psd import/export would be the killer
| feature that enables it to compete with Photoshop. That would
| be huge.
| bonzini wrote:
| Relevant: "PSD is not my favorite format" (2009)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25946103
| raincole wrote:
| I highly doubt if Krita has the man power to do this. They've
| been developing a new text system for more than one year. The
| new text system isn't designed to be compatible with
| Photoshop.
|
| And even if it is, rendering text just like Photoshop is just
| a tiny step towards rendering everything like Photoshop.
| moelf wrote:
| is there an interchangeable format for this? .tiff? .ora?
| raincole wrote:
| If interchangeable format means non-proprietary then Krita's
| .kra is one. If it means a format designed to be used as
| interchangeable format then .ora.
|
| If it means one that everyone uses then none.
| alexvitkov wrote:
| There is one that everyone uses, unfortunately.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Hate defacto standards behind corporations.
|
| M$ Windows, Photoshop, each company gets locked into their own
| CAD nightmare.
|
| On the flip slide, we have Blender, Linux Server, (enough)SQL,
| Git, Stable Diffusion, and maybe python/python libraries if
| that counts.
| raincole wrote:
| When I moved from web dev to game dev, the second most
| surprising thing I found is how much this industry depends on
| proprietary solutions compared to web dev.
|
| The most surprising thing is how little professional people
| get paid, again compared to web dev.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| > The most surprising thing is how little professional
| people get paid, again compared to web dev.
|
| They pay less because they can - there are many more highly
| motivated people who dream of making video games than there
| are open spots.
|
| People are less highly motivated who dream about making
| Another Corporate CRUD App 2.0 (this time with Firefox
| support), and there are a lot more job openings.
| raincole wrote:
| Yes, I understand that. It's just like filmmaking
| industry but not that bad.
|
| If I had had the same level of understanding of economics
| as I do now, I probably would have stayed in web backend
| development.
| pxc wrote:
| From an engineering perspective, are there any things you
| prefer, or are at least glad to have learned from, in
| game dev?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Not too surprising. It's built into gaming's history to
| work on and release a game purely woth in house tech. And
| then submit it to a proprietary console maker for a "seal
| of quality" (or what used to be that). And then other
| important tools (especially for artists, but a lot for
| programmibg) served this same mentality as AAA development
| grew. Support was more important than anything else as
| tools became more comple, and these studios weren't used to
| sharing to begin with.
|
| The phenomenon of open source tools being able to even be
| considered by professional development is a very recent
| phenomenon (in the grand scheme of things). But for
| programmers it's still difficult because console support is
| so important and still extremely closed down.
| nunodonato wrote:
| that's why I switched from gamedev to webdev :D
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Does that one (1) non-Photoshop artist prefer .xcf?
| raincole wrote:
| Clip Studio Paint. I highly doubt any of them even knows .xcf
| (I didn't ask tho).
| sweatypalmer wrote:
| Maybe a stupid question, but if Krita can read/write .psd then
| why does this matter?
| raincole wrote:
| Because just like the most "open source app reading/writing
| proprietary format" scenarios, it doesn't do it perfectly.
|
| Even if you simply import a .psd and re-export it again as-
| is, it will still break things like smart objects and layer
| blending options.
|
| It's not Krita's fault: .psd is not an interchangeable
| format. Implementing .psd support perfectly is basically
| implementing the whole PS itself. It's all the artists'
| "fault". But it doesn't change the fact that using Krita
| makes my days difficult.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| And PSD is notoriously complicated. I remember reading some
| rant by an open source developer and there were things
| along the lines of different endianness in the same file.
|
| It's a 30+ year old format that went to multiple
| transitions. I don't envy the poor soul that has to reverse
| engineer it.
| lloeki wrote:
| > I remember reading some rant by an open source
| developer
|
| This one? https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3a6d609dd72b
| 8493e52a68f31...
| tambourine_man wrote:
| That's the one yes, thanks.
| funnyflywheel wrote:
| I took a look at the git blame, and the commit title is
| perfect.
|
| https://github.com/gco/xee/commit/750196023da5457d9535b30
| 299...
| seanthemon wrote:
| My favorite part is the immediately followed //sanity
| check, too apt.
| alexvitkov wrote:
| Fantastic read, thanks.
| numpad0 wrote:
| And I believe .psd is still the only "raw" common format
| for artistic drawing, right?
|
| I've once seen a .psd that won't display correctly in
| neither Ps or CSP, supposedly because it was exported from
| something else. That didn't seem like a fun situation.
| danShumway wrote:
| Not to detract from raincole's point, and this is not relevant
| at all to their problem, but just a general reminder that in
| many ways Krita is not a direct competitor to Photoshop unless
| you're using Photoshop as a digital painting tool -- and if you
| are, I would argue that Krita is arguably a better product in
| multiple ways.
|
| I think that Photoshop is an _image manipulator_ first and
| foremost, and Krita is a tool for drawing /painting and maybe
| doing some light traditional animation (although even that is
| not its primary focus).
|
| I think that CSP, Procreate, etc... are more direct competitors
| to Krita. Photoshop is a competitor to Gimp.
|
| Again, does not change anything about raincole's comment, and I
| don't think that raincole was suggesting that they were direct
| competitors. It's just that whenever Photosohp and Krita get
| mentioned in the same sentence I feel like the assumption from
| many readers is that they're trying to do the same things, and
| I would personally say that I think they're separate categories
| of software. There are things that Photosohp does that Krita
| doesn't want to do and will probably never support, because
| it's a painting app, not an image manipulation app.
| raincole wrote:
| I agree. Off the top of my head, the most important new
| features they introduced in recent years were:
|
| Krita: A new brush engine. A new file format for brushes.
| Some animation features that I don't use. New text system.
|
| PS: AI-based object selection. AI-based neural filter. AI-
| based generative fill. New Javascript API for plugins.
|
| It's quite clear that Adobe doesn't see PS as a digital
| painting app, but an (AI-assisted) image manipulation app.
| max_ wrote:
| Is Krita used in the corporate world? What companies or niche
| industries use it heavily?
|
| I thought it was more of a tool for hobbyists?
| whoza wrote:
| But krita.org says "Special thanks to Intel, Corporate GOLD
| Sponsor." What's the reconciliation between these two pages?
| moelf wrote:
| https://krita.org/en/item/intel-becomes-first-krita-developm...
|
| maybe that has ended
| hallarempt wrote:
| No, it's still actual, but they don't have a listing the
| fund.krita.org database because they sponsored us directly.
| danShumway wrote:
| Minor suggestion: I understand that for organizational
| purposes and clarity it might make sense to have them
| separate, but I suspect merging those stats together on
| this page might be better for the project overall?
|
| I suspect (but don't have evidence for this) that
| sponsorship tends to snowball -- corporations become more
| likely to sponsor products that are already being
| sponsored; and the harm from users thinking that the
| project has "enough" funding might be outweighed from the
| benefits of users and orgs thinking, "it's normal to
| sponsor Krita, we're not doing something weird or
| experimental by jumping on the bandwagon."
|
| Again, just an instinct though, I could be wrong, and I get
| that this page being part of a larger existing funding
| platform might make including direct sponsors more
| contentious or inappropriate.
| krisoft wrote:
| Sounds like a thing you should fix then?
|
| As a software engineer I understand what you are saying,
| but it is incredibly misleading then.
| winter_blue wrote:
| Why does it say "5 developers $ 17k / month"?
|
| Is that 1 developer of $17k / month? (So a $204k annual salary?)
|
| Or, does it mean 5 developers for $17k / month (i.e. a $40k
| annual salary?)
|
| If it's the latter, I'm highly concerned.
|
| Even in countries like India salaries like $60k USD (INR 50 lakh)
| has become a bare minimum for software engineers who are even the
| least bit talented...
|
| For a really good software developer in India, you'd have to pay
| circa $180k USD (INR 1.5 cr), which is still a massive discount
| compared to the US, since in the US that person would probably
| make around $350k.
|
| Where are they hiring people?
| Uehreka wrote:
| Uhhh, $180k is an awesome developer salary in the US (as long
| as you're not talking about silicon valley salaries, which most
| Americans aren't).
|
| There are also definitely juniors in the US making $60k (and
| probably even less).
| tredre3 wrote:
| Wow that whole comment suggests you're SF/SV-based.
|
| 180k is top pay for a dev in most of America. 50-60k is entry-
| level pay for a dev in most of America. 350k is really uncommon
| outside of your bubble.
|
| Are you really suggesting Indians make as much and even more?
| Then why are companies offshoring to them when they could just
| hire local juniors for the same price?
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Many open source projects have people working for free and
| spending a lot of time on that. Even really low wages may
| enable more people to do this.
|
| I spend a lot of time on developing StreetComplete, got paid
| only for small part of that.
|
| And I would be able to spend more time on that and willing even
| with relatively small funds.
|
| I think that many people would be willing to take significant
| pay cut to work on project chosen by them.
| dmw_ng wrote:
| I genuinely wonder how much that anime waifu logo is costing the
| project
| numpad0 wrote:
| But that's what it's for. Same story as Photoshop and GIMP
| splash screens.
| dmw_ng wrote:
| I didn't think you meant that literally, but after paging
| through a few tens of google image search results for "krita
| samples", it seems the only thing Krita is actually used by
| people for is fantasy art.
|
| Compare to "corel painter samples" where the 2nd thumbnail is
| a fairly impressive Audrey Hepburn rendition
|
| Can't remember the last time I saw output of the style from
| the first search result being used to sell pretty much
| anything
| numpad0 wrote:
| In case my comment sounded a bit harsh, no offense intended
| && taken at my side - I mean, it's an industry of its own
| and a rapidly exploding one, so there are enough reasons
| couple lesser known industry standard software exists.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| You don't like Kiki the Cyber Squirrel?
|
| LibreOffice nearly got a Tyson Tan mascot called Libbie the
| Cyber Oryx. She was silently eliminated from the initial round
| of votes, in favor of a bunch of half-assed attempts that
| included two barely modified Duolingo owls. This perceived
| slight of what had been assumed to be a democratic process
| caused such a dustup that LibreOffice decided it didn't want a
| mascot anymore.
|
| https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2017/11/13/mascot...
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I'd be surprised if it is not donated.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Artists aren't really a crowd to display childish prejudices
| when it comes to anything art.
| cornholio wrote:
| This type of software is an excellent fit for "eventually open"
| licenses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459492
|
| This way, corporations and business users can pay to get the
| latest version and features just like commercial software, while
| the hobbyist community still gets a relative recent and feature-
| full release they can use for free, has source available and is
| guaranteed to become fully GPL code in 3-5 years.
|
| The traditional open source economic models (support and
| customization, services etc.) simply do not work for professional
| software with a large number of non-programmer users. A
| commercial license would allow these clients to pull resources
| together to allow software to be written, and eventually released
| as open source for the benefit of all - and they are the most
| interested in this because they don't want to get locked in.
| [deleted]
| Macha wrote:
| This seems thankfully unlikely for Krita given its origins in
| the KDE project, which for example has the KDE Free Qt
| Foundation as a poison pill should Qt attempt such a move.
| benatkin wrote:
| No it ain't, those are just an attempt to pass something closed
| source off as open source.
|
| At least, I haven't seen the authors give their blessing to a
| fork of the old version of their software, beyond the text of
| the license itself. Maybe it hasn't been long enough, but it
| soon should be.
| cornholio wrote:
| Why would the blessing matter, if the source is available and
| really licensed under a real open license after the
| exclusivity period? Why would the original authors give their
| blessing to a free competitor that aims to drive paying users
| away?
|
| Perhaps you approach this a bit too dogmatically. The
| objective for me as a user is to have good quality software,
| with source available, in a competitive market that does not
| lock me in - because it allows other free or commercial spin-
| offs with low entry barriers.
|
| If we can't ever accept something that does not pass the
| Stallman purity test - even if it means open source
| programmers in some niches should starve - what we end up in
| those niches is binary blobs filled with spyware. And due to
| network effects (see the above .PSD discussion), we soon find
| ourselves forced to swallow the blob because it's the only
| real option.
| sofixa wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, that's pretty similar to the reasoning
| behind BSL, which is even more "open" than "eventually open" -
| code is source available, anyone who isn't a competitor can use
| it however they want outside of competition, and in a fixed
| amount of time (max 4 years) the code becomes truly and
| entirely free to be used however one wants, including
| competition.
| orlandohill wrote:
| Another approach is to allow free non-commercial use, and to
| charge for commercial licenses. There are licenses that grant
| all the rights that non-commercial users want, but still
| require businesses to pay.
|
| https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/
| https://prosperitylicense.com/
| cornholio wrote:
| But that's no longer open source, and offers no protection to
| the users against lock in. All it takes is some change of
| leadership or VC funding and the permissive license will be
| abandoned in favor of a proprietary revenue-maximizing model.
| Human nature and all.
|
| What is needed is a non-repudiable commitment from the vendor
| that the software will be fully open source, and a business
| incentive for them to continue developing the commercial
| version; they have a few years to monetize any new features,
| and to continue making money they need to continue bugfixing
| and creating other desirable new features, as opposed to just
| milking the lock-in cow.
| orlandohill wrote:
| Both the PolyForm Noncommercial License and the Prosperity
| Public License are irrevocable. There is no lock-in.
| Everyone gets the code, just like with an OSI-approved _"
| open source"_ license.
|
| Dual commercial/non-commercial licensing like this is a
| simple way to require commercial users to fund the further
| development and maintenance of the software.
| cornholio wrote:
| They are irrevocable, but they also disallow commercial
| redistribution of modified copies - in perpetuity.
|
| This means that when the original vendor changes new
| versions of the software to a draconic proprietary
| license (as is their right as the full owner of the
| copyright), the community can't fork an older version and
| keep it up to date and distribute that; they can just use
| older versions until they become obsolete, incompatible,
| accumulate security holes etc. They are locked in to the
| vendor is they need those same features going forward.
| orlandohill wrote:
| The commercial license typically grants the right to
| sublicense the software as part of a larger piece of
| software that can be sold commercially.
|
| Both commercial and non-commercial users can copy,
| modify, and redistribute modified and unmodified copies.
| Again, there is no lock-in.
|
| There's little incentive for the developers to switch
| from dual commercial/non-commercial licensing of the
| source code to only distributing compiled executables.
| The whole point of choosing the dual licensing model is
| that it's more attractive to customers. You wouldn't want
| to use such a model if you were trying to keep trade
| secrets, but in such a case you wouldn't consider using
| an open source license either.
|
| Further reading:
|
| https://duallicensing.com/
| https://indieopensource.com/public-private/indies
| orlandohill wrote:
| The PolyForm Project also has other licenses. For example,
| the PolyForm Small Business License allows free use in
| organizations with fewer than 100 individuals and less than
| 1,000,000 USD in annual revenue.
|
| https://polyformproject.org/licenses/small-business/1.0.0
| haunter wrote:
| Krita is also sold as a paid version (store version [0]) for a
| one time fee (never goes on sale). So unlike most open source
| projects it might have a more steady income already. I don't know
| anything about their sales numbers but according to SteamSpy they
| are in the 100-200k range [1] and that's one store only not
| counting MS and Epic.
|
| I was actually arguing for a long time that more open source
| projects should do the same. Be on digital stores and sell the
| application for a one time fee.
|
| 0, https://krita.org/en/download/krita-desktop/
|
| 1, https://steamspy.com/app/280680
| danShumway wrote:
| Krita is also evidence that this model can work in some limited
| instances even though the program is completely monetarily free
| in every sense of the word. It's not "free after X months",
| it's not "free but you pay for premium features" -- it's just a
| free download, but you can buy it in a store. There are only
| two reasons to buy Krita through Steam:
|
| 1. You want to support Krita
|
| 2. You want Steam to handle updating/launching
|
| And it turns out that's enough for them to get some sales.
| People underestimate how often users will either take the path
| of least resistance or purchase something just to be nice.
| Typically when we run into this kind of behavior it's negative,
| for example the struggle to try and get ordinary people to
| install ad blockers. But it's nice with Krita to see that human
| instinct more positively leveraged.
| crawsome wrote:
| If their text editor wasn't a UX disaster, I'd have moved to
| Krita. It's so bad and it drags down the whole program. The devs
| acknowledge it's not great, but have not done anything to make it
| good enough.
| HKH2 wrote:
| Yep it does stick out. A big dialog box obscuring the view.
| Type a font size in the box, and if it loses focus it will
| reset to the original font size.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Im surprised that Hollywood didn't put anything in
| mdtrooper wrote:
| It remembers to me, the HeartBleed:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed where there was only one
| person with salary in a important project.
| grumpymouse wrote:
| It always feels like open source enthusiasts would never pay for
| something themselves, but expect that their boss will for some
| reason. What would your boss get by paying that he/she isn't
| already getting for free?
| distances wrote:
| It would help if the projects had some option to purchase a
| license or subscription, even if the application is open
| source. Lots of employees have a company credit card and the
| authorization to use it for small productivity purchases. But
| it would have to be a business expense that is easy to file,
| not a donation.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Because we expect the person making money from the tool to help
| pay for it. This applies to individuals as well if the tool is
| making them money
| scrpl wrote:
| That's just sad. Open Source support really needs to be
| normalized in corporate environment. Now it's more of an
| exception than the rule.
| masukomi wrote:
| I agree, but in this particular case i have to ask... how many
| companies are actually USING Krita? My impression is that the
| vast majority of places that need software like that use Adobe
| Photoshop/Illustrator, or Affinity Photo/Designer.
| miniupuchaty wrote:
| I see it used by concept-art artists in gamedev studios from
| time to time.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Probably not many if you don't count small individual art
| studios - the mobile gacha game industry(and anime animation
| to some extent) don't standardize art styles and pipeline art
| production as done in American movie and comic industries,
| but relies on intimate collaborations with external,
| individual artists for creative components.
|
| So they mostly only import (Krita-exported) PSD into Ps, or
| even if Krita was used professionally on the floor by
| employed artists, choice of tools would be up to artist's
| discretion and might not become a corporate talking point in
| the way, say, what Maya or Lightwave debate would be.
|
| Maybe OnlyFans/Patreon could throw a million or two for
| couple years...? But Krita is not the first choice across the
| board, and creators on those platform don't seem too
| concerned with CSP/Procreate subscriptions, so that might be
| a difficult path too?
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| That's exactly the problem.
|
| Not only that they use privative products - it's that people
| think about Krita as an alternative to Photoshop, as Krita is
| intended for digital painting rather than general raster
| image manipulation. Hence narrowing the target of Krita to a
| much smaller audience.
| fluoridation wrote:
| To an extent, it is, since a lot of artists use PS to
| draw/paint. For those people, Krita is indeed an
| alternative to PS.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _how many companies are actually USING Krita?_
|
| Assuming a product that advertises its lack of corporate
| support won't be super welcoming of commercial users.
| molave wrote:
| In a corporate setting, it will help if open source software
| has easy deployment configurations to track usage and ensure
| vulnerable versions are not lurking somewhere. Firefox for
| instance has this.
| 7moritz7 wrote:
| > Open Source support really needs to be normalized in
| corporate environment
|
| It won't. The only real workaround right now is to
| simultaneously launch SaaS alongside the FOSS project and
| monetize that heavily.
| basscomm wrote:
| > It won't. The only real workaround right now is to
| simultaneously launch SaaS alongside the FOSS project and
| monetize that heavily.
|
| It can work. Paying for software is already a normal part of
| doing business, make this work to your advantage. For
| example:
|
| - In the budgeting process just add a line item for the FOSS
| software you're using and put a number on it that's lower
| than the proprietary alternative. - If you're already using
| the software (like Krita in this case), tell whoever is in
| charge of the purse strings how much time, effort, and money
| the software has saved the company and ask them to make a
| one-off or recurring payment to the project that's lower than
| the alternative. You'll be surprised how often they say yes
| (as long as they can get a receipt)
| doublerabbit wrote:
| When corporate support rolls in, project tend to turn sour.
|
| Demand from the corporate entities proceed to dominate rather
| than voices from individual donations. Its a double edged
| sword.
| raincole wrote:
| And the examples are? Cause the counter examples are
| _phenomenal_ like Blender and Linux.
| scrpl wrote:
| That's because many corporate "donations" are not so much a
| donation as a way of soft-buying a feature.
|
| It's hard for businesses hyperfocused on short-term gains to
| understand a long-term value of, for example, supporting an
| alternative for an industry-dominating Adobe toolkit. But the
| value is there.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Long-term value that's hard to define doesn't translate
| well to stock price especially when any investment also
| helps competitors who aren't investing anything into the
| project.
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| Krita is accepting corporate donations.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Khara threw a bag of pachinko money in Blender's face to make
| the last Evangelion film work, and it was fine. I guess that
| was a rare occurrence that they desperately and so purely
| needed a tool they can hand to broke freelancers without
| frantically searching for keygens, but it can totally happen
| when incentives are right.
| Maken wrote:
| But they can already support like one and a half full time
| developers. Krita future looks bright.
| mrbump wrote:
| Are they really paying a full time developer only 3000
| EUR/month?
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Many open source projects have people working for free and
| spending a lot of time on that. Even really low wages may
| enable more people to do this.
|
| I spend a lot of time on developing StreetComplete, got paid
| only for small part of that.
|
| And I would be able to spend more time on that and willing
| even with relatively small funds.
|
| I think that many people would be willing to take significant
| pay cut to work on project chosen by them.
|
| For reference, 3000 EUR/month would be a low salary in Poland
| for a programmer but really good overall. I would take it if
| I would be paid for OpenStreetMap development.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| That's a life changing income in some parts of the world, and
| a pittance for skilled knowledge work in others. I hope it's
| going towards someone in the former, and making the local
| market for tech talent that bit more competitive.
| masukomi wrote:
| it should be noted that european developer salaries are
| SIGNIFICANTLY lower than US ones.
|
| US dev salaries have been completely skewed by stupid levels
| of VC money. European ones not so much.
| chmod775 wrote:
| With 3,000 Euro / month you can roughly employ someone
| making 2,400 Euro / month pre-tax (gross) in Germany.
| That's supermarket cashier money.
|
| And only if you pinch pennies (there's just a ~100 Euro
| margin here after unavoidable costs). The rule of thumb in
| Germany is that an employee is going to cost you roughly
| 1.7x their gross salary: that'd be wages of 1,700 Euro /
| month.
|
| The latter is going to pay for 1/4th of a decent software
| developer - and even then you're better promising more than
| 30 paid vacation days among other benefits.
|
| Basically: forget about it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Great developers in India make more than Great developers
| in Europe in my experience. (India has a lot of okay
| developers who don't make very much, but if you want
| someone great you will pay more) some of this is Europe
| culture makes potentially great engineers limit themselves
| to good - they refuse promotions to great, and they refuse
| to officially mentor younger engineers (they do mentor but
| in ways where they don't get credit for as credit would
| them them a promotion). As such it is difficult to have
| great engineers leading the project and without that
| leadership you can't have a project at all.
| [deleted]
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Alternatively they've been completely skewed by the profit
| margins of the big software companies, where it turns out
| they print money regardless of how high payroll gets. As
| supporting evidence, VC funded startups pay less than said
| software companies.
|
| It's interesting that Europe has abjectly failed to produce
| anything like Google or Meta. I'm not sure what the
| underlying reason for that is.
| [deleted]
| sofixa wrote:
| > It's interesting that Europe has abjectly failed to
| produce anything like Google or Meta. I'm not sure what
| the underlying reason for that is.
|
| There isn't a singular reason, it's a complex
| combination. Btw I'd like to preface this to say I'm not
| sure most Europeans actually _want_ a Google or a Meta,
| there is aversion to "too big to fail" companies in most
| sectors.
|
| * investment money - VCs bet on tons of stupid things
| with the hope of some of them making it. Many a crappy
| business model has received hundreds of millions of
| investments to try and make it, and companies spend years
| chasing growth on the back of those investments without
| worrying about profitability. Investment in the EU is
| usually more conservative and grounded in reality - a
| business model of "we'll give it away at a loss for 10
| years to get lots of market share and then increase
| prices to capture the market" simply won't fly here.
|
| * "Europe" isn't a single market in most important senses
| of that word. Each EU country has it's own language (okay
| there's some overlap like Czech and Slovak, Belgium and
| France/Netherlands, Ireland and UK before Brexit, but
| generally), laws, regulations. A single business can't
| just immediately serve the whole of the EU without doing
| due diligence, translations, checking what regulations
| might apply for them, etc. That means that the size of
| the potential market is limited from the start without
| extra investment. A French startup can only sell in
| France until they figure out what is needed to sell in
| the Spanish market, translate websites/products, hire
| support people that speak Spanish, etc. etc. etc. There
| are tons of good quality decently successful European
| startups, but most stay within one or a few countries.
| Exceptions are purely digital companies such as Spotify
| who can afford to sell all around the world with
| relatively few hurdles.
|
| * Regulations and common decency/fear - over here, a
| business model of "we'll fake sell medical devices" or
| "we'll trick people into giving us all their
| movements/desires/internet history and sell that to
| whoever wants it" will hardly fly. Not that there aren't
| unscrupulous people here, there are, but it'd be harder
| to get investment and talent to work for you.
|
| * Better... I'm going to go with social safety net, but
| that's only a part of it. Over here, people are
| _generally_ more content and know they have things to
| fall back on, including retirement. FIRE (Financial
| Independence, Retire Early), "grind mindset", "hustle
| mindset" and similar are quite rare here. People
| prioritise other things than work, don't live to work,
| and don't measure themselves (only) on work. So hustling
| to hit big and become massive is much more rarely seen as
| a good or desired thing.
|
| People often deride the EU for "lacking innovation", but
| IMO that's flat out wrong - those people use wrong
| measurements (lack of massive tech giants) to define
| innovation. There are tons of European startups and
| scaleups and mittelstands and b2b companies of all sizes
| that are successful and innovative. They're just not
| "infinite growth" global behemots, but.. do they need to
| be? Is that the thing that ultimately matters?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _tons of European startups and scaleups and
| mittelstands and b2b companies of all sizes that are
| successful and innovative. They 're just not "infinite
| growth" global behemots_
|
| If their business has no economies of scale, no. If it
| does, they won't survive without subsidies.
|
| At a certain point, subsidising a low-scale domestic
| replica of an efficient international option breaks due
| to (a) the internet and consumer choice or (b) cost.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are a lot of businesses that are great for a small
| shop and will make a lot of money, but they have no
| potential to grow larger. Those businesses are not a
| domestic replica of some efficient international option
| as there never will be an international option. If you to
| become a billionaire you have to start one of those
| international businesses, but if you are content with a
| million you can get that on a much smaller local company
| and you don't have to deal with investors at all.
|
| Software does lend itself to international options more
| than other fields as the upfront costs are high and
| ongoing costs are low. (compare to plumbers where you can
| start a company with a van and a fittings, but you have
| to pay the plumbers you hire every year - by the time you
| pay the plumbers and the office workers to schedule them
| there isn't much $ left over)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _lot of businesses that are great for a small shop and
| will make a lot of money, but they have no potential to
| grow larger_
|
| You're describing businesses without economies of scale.
| They can compete simply by being local.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Scale seems relative here, no? Scaling to serve a few
| nearby countries is still some sort of scale, just not
| worldwide scale.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Economies of scale can plateau, yes. In those cases I'd
| argue there's a niche for a medium-sized company. (Most
| law is in this category.) But if there are further
| economies of scale, the company that seizes the worldwide
| market will simply have lower costs and more R&D capital
| to work with.
| sofixa wrote:
| > the company that seizes the worldwide market will
| simply have lower costs
|
| Not necessarily. Let's imagine a company that does
| budgeting and bank account centralisation, sold as a
| SaaS. A global company has to work on integrations with
| banks all around the world, data privacy regulations all
| around the world, translations including in right to left
| languages, fun stuff like UPI in India, cash payments to
| a machine in Japan, currency conversions etc. Meanwhile a
| Bulgarian startup in that space only needs to interface
| with the 15 local banks and use EU-mandated APIs that
| make their lives easier (all integrations are the same),
| and provide only one language, one currency. They don't
| need employees policies for 50 different countries, with
| local HR and legal departments/subcontractors everywhere.
| Not to mention layers of management to scale.
|
| Do you still think the global company will have lower
| costs?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _A global company has to work on integrations with
| banks all around the world, data privacy regulations all
| around the world, translations including in right to left
| languages, fun stuff like UPI in India, cash payments to
| a machine in Japan, currency conversions etc. Meanwhile a
| Bulgarian startup in that space only needs to interface
| with the 15 local banks and use EU-mandated APIs_
|
| You're describing a system with economies of scale, up to
| a point, followed by negative economies of scale. That's
| my argument: this is a good business for a European
| company to dominate.
| grumpymouse wrote:
| I would argue that many of the big tech companies have
| also been subsidised rather than being efficient. It has
| just been private investors rather than governments (and
| it feels like we are starting to see the end of that).
| sofixa wrote:
| If the market was theoretical and all things were
| absolutely equal, yes, maybe, but that's not how things
| work in the real world.
|
| For a good example, Walmart failed miserably in Germany
| because they failed to understand the local market in any
| way. You can have a successful regional chain of
| supermarkets without it needing to become Walmart-scale.
| Just being local, having a strong local presence and
| understanding of the market, and having local costs can
| be a massive advantage. A Bulgarian startup has economies
| of local labour costs that can trump the economies of
| scale of Google. Spotify are quite successful even if
| their competitors (Apple, Google, Amazon) are _massive_.
| Not to mention there are big market segments where
| economies of scale across markets simply do not apply.
| Legalstart, a startup doing "law services online" for
| small and medium enterprises in France cannot apply
| pretty much anything to any other country due to the
| different legal systems. If there was some massive
| behemoth in that space globally, Legalstart still
| wouldn't have an "economies of scale" disadvantage.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they 've been completely skewed by the profit margins
| of the big software companies_
|
| This is correct. VC-backed companies aren't leading base
| compensation gains.
| jehb wrote:
| I do hope it's a fair and living wage for whomever is
| receiving it.
|
| That said, I absolutely would take a significant pay cut to
| get to work on a project I cared about again. Golden
| handcuffs are not absolute.
| lsferreira42 wrote:
| 3000 EUR/month is a 16k salary in Brazil this make you top 1%
| earners in the country!
| nisegami wrote:
| That would be a meaningful raise for me actually, but the
| skillset is a lot more specialized as well.
| nicce wrote:
| The problem is that commercial company might have 20 full-time
| developers and resources to use third-party services, and they
| compete with Krita. Can Krita stay competitive enough to
| attract more funders and users? If they can't, userbase (mostly
| because of the AI) will shift more towards commercial products,
| and over long period, Krita will die. I hope that won't happen.
| omgmajk wrote:
| Curious. After all I've heard about Krita in the last few years
| one would think at least a couple of larger studios would use it
| to some extent.
| moelf wrote:
| the Diamond tier seems to be a studio, but yeah I totally
| agree.
| egypturnash wrote:
| ASIFA isn't a studio, it's a non-profit that exists to
| "promote and encourage the art and craft of animation", to
| quote their about page. Their most notable effort is putting
| on the yearly Annie awards.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| I use this instead of Acorn/Gimp/etc now for regular web image
| editing (for app dev)
| cpach wrote:
| Cool. I haven't used Krita, but I've always thought of it as a
| painting tool. But apparently it can do more than that!
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