I certainly didn’t apply any trick (or at least, not intentionally). As I said, I was only interested in testing the metadata/xmp handling side of bridge, but I accidentally discovered I could also develop raws with it…
I fully agree
I’m actually focussed on Aurelien’s comment way up around post 25 - the results of the survey, and his question of why not more users, why not a more even distribution across countries, why is it skewed towards certain education, technological backgrounds etc. He was questioning whether enough “artists” were using it over engineers and technical experts, and if not, why not?
My posts have been my thoughts/opinion on what the vulnerabilities are to dt’s future success in order to get to answers to the problem (which did shift a bit - early on it was was about why more users and a better cross-range of users weren’t using it, more recently people have said maybe the goal is not to have more users).
So in summary, I wonder about:
-
Are developers following an agreed upon roadmap for improvements? While dt is lucky to have Aurelien’s engineering/coding/photography skills, what is to prevent another developer from taking it down a different path? A roadmap with a longer-term vision seems like a good way to keep all developers heading in the right direction and lessen risk of introducing bad ideas into the program.
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Developers seems scarce and are subject to being able to spend large amounts of time in a largely volunteer role. Aurelien says he is not yet getting minimum wage from donations. That seems like a huge risk to me - so are there ways to engage with foundations or other means to create a financial base to support core team members?
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We know dt was born and is mostly used as a linux program. Is it a windows and mac program too? If so, but its very hard to get developers in those OS worlds to come on board, then keeping Win/Mac versions up to date will be very difficult. It may be a bit disingenuous to encourage non-linux users that dt is a fantastic program to move too if the continued development/support may be a challenge. Is there an approach to try to actively get win/mac coders to come on board? It feels to me it might be more a question of luck.
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We’ve all seen the reasons non-FOSS users list of why they want to stick with commercial programs. How does dt brand itself as an artist’s tool for artists and shed some of the typical stereotypes (e.g. personally, I think “free” is a grossly over-rated reason to turn to FOSS. “value” is a much better reason - the program gives good value (quality, features, future)). dt is in a position to sell-itself on its ability to create better results due to the new linear workflow. Are better communications, promotion, education needed to convince people of its value?
So, those, and my previous posts were all about the survey results and the first questions posed. My reference to OpenOffice was trying to get at what makes some FOSS so successful…and though I’m not familiar with it, seems blender is a better example to look it. Questions for folks working on blender: how do you attract a range of developers in various OSs? Are you following a long-term development plan that new developers can immediately follow? How do you support developers to keep them engaged? More information, thought, understanding of these questions might make the future of dt more solid and attractive.
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I’d suggest that for every LR user there are likely 1000 who are completely happy with SOOC jpg’s.
Doesn’t seem to work for me. Bridge and LR both still work without a licence for their DAM functions, but I can’t get Camera Raw to work and get the “no licence” dialogue box when I try.
Especially out of their phones. Why camera sales are slumping!
yup
Ah! so it’s not a unversal thing… now i wonder what I did to make it happen… I’m pretty sure I never installed trial versions of neither lightroom nor photoshop 
Free software development doesn’t really work like that. We could make a roadmap and maybe a few features would get implemented, but developers are scratching their own itch and sharing it with the rest of us. Devs will go in the direction they want.
The best thing to do right now is to donate to him. We have looked at a foundation/nonprofit, but that costs more money, lawyers, and paperwork, can take years, and we may never get nonprofit status.
It is if people do the work. If people don’t do the work, then there is not binary for end users. We’ve had people quite angry before about others not making a binary for them to use.
Sure, and we try to do that to some extent. But we don’t have marketing and we don’t have a budget, so we get our users one at a time. You convince one person, or you help one new person overcome the initial hurdles. That’s how we get new users.
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I’m sorry, I certainly didn’t mean to imply that. From what I can gather after doing a bit more digging, it used to work standalone, then there was apparently a period where having opened it at least once with a licenced qualifying app on the machine unlocked the feature and now the qualifying app has to be there all the time. Older installs still work apparently. I reinstalled Bridge on my Win10 machine to check and got the message about it needing a qualifying app. This is confirmed on the Adobe support forum.
Yes. I’m fixing stuff that I want to fix or that I found that needed to be fixed or something like that 
and I’m motivated enough to do it 
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darktable development doesn’t work like that. A lot of the bigger FLOSS projects do have roadmaps.
I think there is a lot of stuff that could be done without having roadmaps to make the development process better than wasting effort in establishing a roadmap (like coding standards, code reviews, better testing, using code analysis tools, etc), but this is thinking on the developer side, not the user one.
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Yes, and they have budget and business backing.
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Thats true. but developers (which are users too) contributes more to the product than most other users are willing to do. It’s about sharing, not charity: developers shares what they implemented to meet their requirements …
yes, what you write looks correct. I have it installed on a VM, which I backed up before upgrading. after the upgrade, I can no longer use camera raw. I’ll try to restore the backup and see if the old version works… if not, no big deal 
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Or they have features on their roadmap for decades, which are not implemented and suddenly and secretly vanish from the roadmap again (multi-page inkscape documents anyone?) … better to have an active project without a roadmap than the other way round 
.
But what came first, the backing/budget or the roadmap?
So the Inkscape roadmap did not manage to manage your expectations because devs didn’t stick to the roadmap? That does sound like roadmaps are quite powerful in managing expectations for better or worse.
Hello everyone,
But what came first, the backing/budget or the roadmap?
Writing down a roadmap is pretty easy.
What it is difficult is being able to deliver it: just think at CMYK feature for GIMP which has been in the works for years now.
As regards the budget it is extremely diffucult to get a constant and steady income to sustain an open source project.
For Gimp there have been 2 developers [1 ] [2] on Patreon, and other platforms to get some funding, who have barely reached around 1000 euros a month these past years. And Gimp has thousands of estimated users (Windows + Mac + Linux platforms).
Krita and Blender are two succesful projects in this domain (money collecting) but it took years of constant efforts to hire some full-time developers [3].
Blender, for instance, has been in development for more than 20 years now.
BTW, at present, on Windows (90% of estimated users) you can buy permanently, for around 50 euros, graphical softwares like Affinity, On1 Photo Raw editor etc. This without any annaul subscription (aka Adobe).
IMHO, On1 Photo raw editor for instance is a good alternative to Darktable. One big downside: it does not run on Linux (and no I don’t have On1 installed on my computer since I prefer the open souce stuff…).
[1] Øyvind Kolås | creating digital media tools | Patreon
[2] ZeMarmot team | creating an Animation film, GIMP and other Free Software | Patreon
[3] The Inside View: How Krita is Developed | Krita
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I can’t understand how this software is better than GIMP. I tried it, I was unimpressed…
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Hello @paperdigits
I can’t understand how this software is better than GIMP. I tried it, I was unimpressed…
As for me, I have read really great reviews about Affinity.
For this reason last year I have bought it.
Its price was around 50 euros and it is a permanent licence (no temporary annual solution).
In my view, it is extremely fair (compared to Adobe at least which sucks you dry…).
In all truth, I have “worked” with Affinity only a few sessions and I have at last ditched it because I am too used to GIMP…
Especially, since I can install GIMP on every computer I work with (Linux, friends, work etc).
To be more precise, as compared to GIMP, I decided to buy Affinity because, compared to GIMP, it had:
- better support for vectors graphics (SVG). With Gimp everything (svg) is rasterized…
- Stacking support: not on the level of Zerene or Helicon but…;
- Macro support: no scripting needed (Python, Lua you name it);
- Better text support (e.g. list of favourites fonts used in the menu);
- native Raw support (no need to use Darktable etc).
- etc etc
To recap, I would never leave GIMP because of G’MIC filters.
I really appreciate them.
I have worked with them since their very first creation by David many years ago (time flies…)
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It’s probably worth mentioning Software Freedom Conservancy.
Software Freedom Conservancy is a not-for-profit charity that helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Conservancy provides a non-profit home and infrastructure for FLOSS projects. This allows FLOSS developers to focus on what they do best — writing and improving FLOSS for the general public — while Conservancy takes care of the projects’ needs that do not relate directly to software development and documentation.
Some of their well known member projects:
- git
- Inkscape
- Qemu
- Samba
- Wine
…and there’s a bunch of others.
It could be a good fit, skipping most of the need for money, lawyers, paperwork, and years to get a non-profit status.
Meanwhile, if you can afford it, you really should pay Aurélien for all the great work he’s been doing and all the neat stuff that’s coming too. (And his videos are extremely informative also.)
(Edit: Whoops! I pasted the wrong link. Fixed. Thanks for pointing it out, @johnny-bit. 
)
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