Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:42:49 -0500
From: Daniel Falk [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Please do something to get in touch with users, I could never
honestly ever say theGimp could be a replacement for photoshop
ever if this continues.
Gimp may or may not be a Photoshop replacement. That depends on
the user. For me, it's a replacement because since I'm using it
I'm not using Photoshop. But certain people want to keep using
Photoshop. If your plan is using Photoshop for free, then Gimp
it's not for you. If you need an image manipulation program, be
welcome. If you want Photoshop for Linux, which is a valid
desire, you should start asking Adobe to port it, not Gimp coders
to create a feature by feature clone.
Anyway, I also think that a better communication between existing
coders and users would be nice for certain situations. But
non-users-wanting-photoshop aren't gimp users. And I understand
when a coder pisses off if one of these guys say Gimp sucks
because it hasn't X feature and threatens not using Gimp if the
coders don't do what he wants.
I understand such things can piss off the people who are devoting
their own time to the project. But if I'm understanding you right,
you're suggesting that users shouldn't hope for gimp to be as
feature-filled as photoshop. But why not? As a believer in
open-source, I want gimp to be the best it can be and I'm willing
to submit feature requests and bug reports to help get it that way.
I'd rather spend my time doing that than getting a proprietary
software package ported to linux by Adobe (not gonna happen!)
Don't confuse feature counts (my product has 101 features and yours
has 100, so mine's better) or specific individual features that might
or might not matter to a few people with overall product utility. In
particular, just because GIMP and Photoshop do some things differently
doesn't make one better or worse than the other, just different.
The GIMP developers aren't (at least for the most part) interested in
building a Photoshop clone. Nothing's stopping someone else from
taking the code base and doing just that, but the GIMP team has its
own vision.
Submitting feature requests by itself isn't usually a very productive
endeavor for most projects. There's no shortage of people with ideas;
what's needed are people who can and will realize those ideas. That
doesn't mean that participating in discussions isn't useful, but if
you want to help GIMP move along, you need to find more active ways of
doing so -- programming is only one such way.
Finally, to address more specifically your point about nested-window
MDI (aka window in window): that paradigm may work on Windows
(although it quickly grew tedious a dozen years ago when I used
Pagemaker), but on Linux/UNIX it doesn't work. One reason why that is
specific to X (the X window system) is that the windows inside the
parent window can't (at least at present) be managed by the window
manager running under X: they have to be managed by the application
itself.
There are a lot of different window managers available, and most of
those window managers can be customized almost endlessly, and there is
no one standard. Not just decorations -- basic window behavior can be
varied. Not everyone likes click to focus and raise (i. e. you have
to explicitly select a window, which raises it to the top). For
example, I use its polar opposite, focus strictly follows mouse with
no raising of windows except on my explicit request (i. e. whatever
window the mouse is in is the one that's active, even if it's
partially buried under other windows). What all this means is that
the windows inside the container may behave very differently from what
the user is accustomed to, which is very distracting (try using the
newest version of acroread with multiple PDF files using focus follows
mouse, and you'll see what I mean -- and yes, I know how to turn that
off, but I've simply switched to kpdf instead).
Nested windows are also a pain to use if you want to have multiple
applications in use simultaneously, because the big container hides
all the other windows. I prefer to either just live with the mess or
use multiple virtual desktops. But if you want to implement nested
windows, go ahead -- if the GIMP folks don't want to accept the patch,
you can distribute it yourself.
I think it is important to open source projects that they value
their users and reach out to potential users. It's good for a
project to have many people interested in it, even if those people
don't code. I'm not saying that the GIMP doesn't value and reach
out. I just want to establish the point that those are actually
good things to do in the first place.
Well, free software or open source isn't simply about freedom without
responsibility. You certainly have the freedom to use and modify the
software without restriction, to redistribute it
