How are these two statements compatible with one another?
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do you read all posts? are you his friend? can i ask you why is your comment one sided and not fair? donāt you read all the postās? it is not funny to gang up on one person.
As much as I like reading other ppl arguing over nothing, this forum has so far enjoyed a pretty high standard of expression, eloquence and eq. Letās all do our best to keep it that way.
@low_elo_chess I understand your frustrations. You really like Natron, you love FOSS and itās a great software but not quite perfect and you are afraid to invest time in it because you donāt know if it will still be around in a year or two. I get it, we all do.
But as others have answered already, Natron is in the maintenance mode and that means it wonāt go away any time soon because there are developers who will make sure that you will at least be able to run it in the future.
Then again, with your help and promotion someone might get interested into taking a more active role in the project and contribute significant development time. I think that at this point Natron is too big to fail and it just waits for the right people to discover it and push it forward.
So donāt worry too much, if you can do your work with it then just use it and itāll be fine 
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As this thread has mostly devolved into an Off-Topic discussion, letās leave it alone for a bit and maybe revisit it later if thereās something constructive to add.
(I donāt want to lock the topic needlessly).
Letās just leave it with @KristijanZicās well written comment for now.
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thank you people for giving answer to my question,
it seems it is developed Off-Topic but if you look deeper it actually is not so much off! Although I donāt enjoy hurtful arguing and I donāt want it to continue that way, I think this topic actually uncovered a problem that we have in not only Natron but also most other FOSS projects. I think there is a fundamental problem in majority open source projects and unlike some lucky projects (Firefox,Blender,Linux Kernel,WordPress,etc) smaller projects and less fortunate and popular projects have a hard time.
YES, everybody understands that people are not slaves and nobody can demand other people to work for them for free.
at the same time, people that are going to spend their time and resources on learning a software or even if a studio or big project is going to rely on a software they should know in what state the software is.
this is really a hard and complicated problem! we need to find better ways to make healthy and growing societies.
i donāt mean that my post toward @ rodlie was best way to answer but if we put this personal mistake aside!
we have an argument here
yes because we donāt pay and we are not customers you can say that you can not demand new futures or complain about some things that are minimum necessary (it is a general argument and i am not talking about Natron)
and I can clearly see only those projects that assume and act as if they are responsible and are listening to fair criticism and are open to new suggestions are the successful projects.
it is not just about it being free, as we see today windows is forcing people to update to new forced futures they make it impossible to install older version of window in new hardware because they have influence over hardware companies etc, too soon more project are going to become more weirder they charge as much as they like and maybe soon they ask for a portion of your money for things that you made with they software and more crazy things that today may seem absurd but as i see the way this world is going can easily happen in future.
in order to stop some companiesā slave peopleās creativity and treat them the way they like because they have a monopoly on something GPL and FOSS came into life, or maybe I think this way!
I know that people have to have income and yes humans need money, it is clear for me that sadly most projects are suffering to balance their resources. and those projects that are successful are only those projects that are supported either with large society because they are popular software or they are supported by big tech companies or interested wealthy individuals or sacrifices of developers.
It seems to me that most people are not willing to donate to free software and some free software are treating people like they just throw a piece of bone before a dog and since it is free just be grateful.
it is a complicated problem and maybe unsolvable.
i donāt know ,some-times i just canāt justify the whole notion of free software since nothing else is free and the developer is paying for everything in his/her life why should he work for free and why should i bother myself using something that has not a guaranteed support and treats me like it is giving me charity.
maybe everything is just the best it can be i am really confused and i have mixed feelings.
i can not rationally justify what i want, there is a feeling of making every person able to have tools of expression (writing,publishing,drawing,etc) and at the same time i canāt justify it economically.
Clearly I have too much lust for the result and most probably what is already in place is the best that could have happened realistically, and sorry for making confused feelings here.
maybe some things donāt have an answer and it is my mistake to find a clear guide line toward life that is the real problem here.
thank you all and sorry for posting my crazy thoughts here and making you confused 
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Please explain how you got this quantitative analysis.
It seems like you understand one of the fundamental problems that I have also been grappling with.
Thereās quite a bit to think about when considering FOSS, support (both monetary, man-hours, and support to users), and growth.
Itās one of those topics that I think about often and Iām still not quite sure what a good solution might be (and in many cases I am learning new things every day about the process of creating and sustaining Free Software). One of these days Iāll actually sort my thoughts out and present them to the community so that hopefully some people much smarter than I can maybe help me understand it a little bit better.
In the end, I think focusing on the fundamentals of the craft help to avoid software-specific solutions and workflows. Understanding how something works underneath the software helps to make the transitions to other software a little bit easier. (Rotoscoping video is a time-consuming process no matter what youāre using for instance - or the basics of chroma-keying donāt really change).
Maybe Iāll try to write some of these thoughts down soon and Iāll ping you when I do. Perhaps if we can identify some key things we might be able to find a way to help these projects not just survive but thrive.
I thought I was the only one allowed to post crazy thoughts and confuse people!
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Do you know why PHP, Linux Kernel, C, Python are successful?
isnāt it because they are used by big giant corporations and those companies because of it being cheaper and easier to help and use those instead of making it themselves are paying lots of money to those projects?
all the projects that are doing perfect are those that make profit for big tech companies
Firefox , WordPress are indirectly helping web and google grow so google likes them and throws money to them but something like gimp and Inkscape is not so much relevant for big tech and are used by individuals only, and in these category something like gimp which is more general than something like Natron has better chance of getting attention and support it needs
but small projects that are not profitable for big tech have hard time to make sustainable development.
i never said that i have a quantitative analysis but as far as i see as a person! those projects that are not profiting companies are more likely to die or become zombies.
and best example i can give you is operating system, Linux as operating system is profiting big tech companies so it grows in that direction ābest choice for serversā but it is not doing even 1/10 of what is done on servers on desktops āindividual usageā
and if something like LibreOffice or qgis has grown relatively recently in recent years is because of some European government and companies interested in them.
a project that has no profit for big tech companies or governments is simply dying or it is just maintained by sacrifices that the original developer is doing + some community help.
if you disagree just name 3 projects that are not in the situation that I said.
and i think another example could be games (since they are falling to individual usage and not profiting companies ā¦)
So I think we āindividualsā are not able to support these projects, most people donāt donate and I think most projects donāt know how to ask and encourage people to help them, so some do good enough but some are completely failing to get help.
although Natron can be profitable to companies and studios but it has failed to do so.
as much as we want to deny the role of money! it is a clear factor, and it is like blood in the vain.
you canāt just say to any non developer to do it yourself! since we are not god and all knowing and not everybody is able to help with coding.
That implied a quantitative analysis in my opinion
It will die, if the user base shrinks because of lack of quality and improvements to the software.
Darktable, RawTherapee and Siril are constantly improving. Same for Gimpā¦
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I didnāt say that.
will if there is a successful project is by sacrificial acts of developers
for example a football player make millions of money and a useful project like siril should struggle to pay for web hosting!
or you can just make stupid videos (throwing mint in soda) and make more money than most FOSS projects make. there is videos in YouTube with over 10 million view which made thousandās of dollars and they just throw mint in soda!
why we humans should not be able to manage our resources better? is it best we can do?!
i bet that one video made more money than Gimp received donation in 20 years
siril website: If you like the software, please help us by contributing with the Donate button on the top right. Siril takes us a lot of time and we still have to pay for the servers.
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The FOSS landscape is a lot more diverse and complicated than what you describe. @heckflosse gave you three good examples that belie your assertions.
At its fundamental, a FOSS software is usually created out of the interest of one or a few programmers that just are motivated to solve a particular problem. No market, no money, just a bit of interest. Where it goes from there is a bit more nuanced than your ādie or zombieā outcome.
To that end, Iāve written a raw processor of my own, evolved and modified it all by my lonesome for about 10 years now, and have no inclination to take it any further than my basement although Iāve posted it to github for all to see. Where do I fit in your world? 
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I think the question is how to get Peter Jackson or James Cameron interested in Natron?
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Youāre a zombie Glenn xP
just kidding
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If Zombie=Dumbass, my wife will agree with youā¦ 
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Naah, but thatās a common theme with wives and open source devs or researchers Iāve noticed xD
Try explaining to a wife that youāre using your time and money to make a community (not even a tangible piece of software that she can use!). 
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Since I donāt have a wife I never really notice how stuff like that might sound crazy to a ānormalā person. And if I havenāt been indoctrinated by RMS and others, today that might sound crazy to me also.
Back to the topic. Companies donāt care for FOSS that much. They care for the software that accomplishes a task with acceptable result in the least amount of time. Not having an outrageously expensive license is a plus but not a must.
I think darktable is the closest to that goal. It lacks some big features like painted raster masks that will probably never come but itās pretty much there otherwise and ready to replace any other raw processor.
Natron however in my opinion first needs a new theme and a nice one. Iāve noticed that even if you have the most powerful software ever, if its theme sucks then nobody will use it.
Unfortunately to the ordinary user a nice theme is a measure of productās quality.
Kinda like if you were to measure the quality of a book by itās weight.
If the software is presentable then it makes sense to showcase it on youtube videos etc, otherwise there is a lot of competition; After Effects, Fusion, Nuke, Hitfilm.
But the point is to use it. With Natron I get the feeling that everybody waits for it to become the best compositing software ever but nobody uses it for any productions now. How can we change that?
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