On Wednesday, August 9, 2017 2:25:23 AM IST Miguel Lopez wrote:
There's no way to get all the data in time as it would take a while to extrapolate all the comments in the internet, but I'll tell you that with reddit for example, there has been less positive responses with GIMP funding needs than say other rapid developed open source project overall (at least I seen a person want GIMP as a dead project because he had enough of stagnating development, and then there's another who won't donate to GIMP developers because he doesn't see the point of supporting a stagnating project).
Take the reddit comments with a pinch of salt, Krita Inkscape and GIMP all have some users who hate them or think that the devs are doing it wrong. We wouldn't want to discourage the existing developers by taking some strange troll reddit users comment seriously. They have the right to have their opinion but don't generalise it.
In comparison with Affinity Photo, and Krita, GIMP is behind and GIMP has been developed for 15+ years and have loads of web support over the years. And the amount of visitors to GIMP tutorials has decreased over time.
Actually if you try GIMP 2.9 there are loads of feature in it. but it is not yet available in the distribution channel, it is still in beta, although you can use it without any problem. It has high bit depth support, good painting tools, and yesterday they added a new blend mode called passthrough to improve psd compatibility. See not a stangnant or dead project. Just because the reddit user is ignorant and not competent enough to look into the development going on in the project, doesn't mean it is dead.
I agree that they take their time, but the reason for that is they have less developers to work on things like any other opensource software. We can't expect a dozen of developers competing against the speed of may be thousand developers working in an assembly line styled development model backed with immense money of propreitary software. Have patience is all I can say :)
Basically, the potential of getting funds reduces over time,
That partly may be because opensource projects don't have a PR or marketing team, somehow we fall short in communicating or generating the buzz. May be learning from libreoffice marketing team or blender foundation may help?