It's been over "20 years in the making", Blender 2.93 LTS is out now

Such a massive project, this is amazing news. I had no idea of the money being thrown at Blender, but it looks like AMD, Nvidia and Unity all donate massively on a monthly basis, and it wasn't all that long ago that Epic also threw over a million dollars at them!

They're on $135K/month, funding 20 developers full time. I wish more FOSS projects got this kind of support, but it's great to see Blender go from strength to strength!

Blender devs still embarrassing the competition with their breakneck pace. It's working too, gone are the days where people would ask me at work what I'm using and sound puzzled when I said Blender. These days when there's a new hire, usually the answer from them is "Oh I use Blender, it's actually really awesome, it's open source too, have you heard of Blender?!".

These performance improvements are really adding up for Cycles, and the geometry nodes are growing with each update, they're going to become a killer feature of Blender.

Blender is OP!

what a time for foss

Imagine we could do for GIMP what has been done for Blender, what an amazing thing that would be.

In a world with Adobe SaaS I could imagine many rich companies throwing some coin at the FOSS Sauce to save money in the future.

Why are those company funding Blender?

Imagine we could do for GIMP what has been done for Blender, what an amazing thing that would be.

Will never happen while it's called GIMP.

Why are those company funding Blender?

I guess because Blender is a fundamental element in game development, and more games developed means more business for these companies.

Why are those company funding Blender?

My bet is that they think it can serve as an Autodesk (3ds Max, Maya) replacement, where for maybe less money (Most drop 30K a year) you can actually get to have a voice in the foundation, so for less money (probably) you get more gain.

Can this happen with GIMP? Not in quite some time, I think. Maybe Godot can slowly take some of Unity's market share, but I'm not sure.

Libreoffice is another one where you might see, if 1) DOCX support improves or 2)Institutoins around the world adopt ODF as the standard format. Less cost, more control over the final product you get, I think it's the best way it could go, tbh

Can this happen with GIMP? Not in quite some time, I think.

Don't think so either. For professional level 3D modellers/renderers there was a huge market gap. For a lot of supporting parties there is a clear benefit of having one sit in a place that was affordable to regular people and companies just starting out. This is not really the case for image manipulation where Adobe stepped in to serve that segment by itself.

Imagine we could do for GIMP what has been done for Blender, what an amazing thing that would be.

Will never happen while it's called GIMP.

Unfortunately, the project for GIMP-that's-not-called-GIMP withered on the vine.

Imagine we could do for GIMP what has been done for Blender, what an amazing thing that would be.

Will never happen while it's called GIMP.

Unfortunately, the project for GIMP-that's-not-called-GIMP withered on the vine.

It's a obscure non-contextual meaning in one language that is not the native language of most people. You can't expect the general population to care.

i wish we could transfer the sucess of an open source project to another...
i mean, microsoft made a lot of money selling visual basic and used that money to fund the development of office and windows, then they made a shit ton of money with office and windows and used it to fund internet explorer (that dominated the market a long time ago beofre they shifted their resources to something else),
directx, xbox, azure, windows media player (wich kinda died due to countless reasons), msn, windows live mensenger etc...

now imagine if blender could do something like that and help other projects...
actually they can, and some times open source companies do it, mozilla for instance helped godot and others, the main issue is that doing so dont direct benefit then and they dont have as many sources as an big company do (mozilla helping godot to export for web helps mozilla to turn the web into an platform but not so much as directx helped microsoft keep their dominance, on an side note at least they cant leave it without resources as microsoft did with internet explorer once they thought it was not nescessary to invest money into it anymore)

one of the main issues of those sporadic donations is that they seem to be too fragmented, maybe they should put a lot of money into an particular project until it can walk with it own legs before helping someone else?


Last edited by elmapul on 3 June 2021 at 11:34 am UTC

Imagine we could do for GIMP what has been done for Blender, what an amazing thing that would be.

Will never happen while it's called GIMP.

Unfortunately, the project for GIMP-that's-not-called-GIMP withered on the vine.

It's a obscure non-contextual meaning in one language that is not the native language of most people. You can't expect the general population to care.

I'm not bothered by the name. Sure, stating from the outset that your product is in some way subservient or hobbled isn't the best marketing move, no matter how hilarious the initial devs found it, but whatever. There are other products whose names are gibberish (Tumblr and what-have-you) or way worse (the Toyota Shit, for example).

Liam's right that there are some people that are bothered by the name. Glimpse showed us that there aren't enough people that want to use and improve the Gimp, but are bothered by the name, to make it actually viable.

Personally, I think the non-responsiveness of the Gimp project to the GTK and Python transitions is what's doomed it, way more than the name, and some other project will steadily acquire more advanced functionality and eventually take over that niche entirely.

Two recent made-in-Blender things I really enjoyed are:

Captain Yajima (shown also in the Blender showreel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-TJm7HkzkQ

and Ian Hubert's Dynamo Dream Episode 1: Salad Mug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsGZ_2RuJ2A

Imagine we could do for GIMP what has been done for Blender, what an amazing thing that would be.

Will never happen while it's called GIMP.

Unfortunately, the project for GIMP-that's-not-called-GIMP withered on the vine.

It's a obscure non-contextual meaning in one language that is not the native language of most people. You can't expect the general population to care.

I'm not bothered by the name. Sure, stating from the outset that your product is in some way subservient or hobbled isn't the best marketing move, no matter how hilarious the initial devs found it, but whatever. There are other products whose names are gibberish (Tumblr and what-have-you) or way worse (the Toyota Shit, for example).

Liam's right that there are some people that are bothered by the name. Glimpse showed us that there aren't enough people that want to use and improve the Gimp, but are bothered by the name, to make it actually viable.

Personally, I think the non-responsiveness of the Gimp project to the GTK and Python transitions is what's doomed it, way more than the name, and some other project will steadily acquire more advanced functionality and eventually take over that niche entirely.

Could be. I know that in the culture of my firm (that is, the firm where I work), if I tried to promote a tool internally, and that tool is called "the GIMP", it's gonna be laughed out of town. I work at a big financial, and to this day, we still get raised eyebrows over adopting Splunk as our SIEM platform. Genuinely think that people underestimate how deeply embarrassing a developer in joke like this is. Can you imagine presenting your platform choices to your client base, and you've got that one on there? I suppose it depends on your client base... but I'd prefer not to have to explain, for the 20th+ time that a gnome developer thought this was a good idea.

I just don't even want to have a conversation with my management team where I try to convince them to use such a stupidly-named tool. The entire meeting would quite rightly devolve into Pulp Fiction jokes.

Could be. I know that in the culture of my firm (that is, the firm where I work), if I tried to promote a tool internally, and that tool is called "the GIMP", it's gonna be laughed out of town. I work at a big financial, and to this day, we still get raised eyebrows over adopting Splunk as our SIEM platform. Genuinely think that people underestimate how deeply embarrassing a developer in joke like this is. Can you imagine presenting your platform choices to your client base, and you've got that one on there? I suppose it depends on your client base... but I'd prefer not to have to explain, for the 20th+ time that a gnome developer thought this was a good idea.

I just don't even want to have a conversation with my management team where I try to convince them to use such a stupidly-named tool. The entire meeting would quite rightly devolve into Pulp Fiction jokes.

90% of the world wouldn't even know there's a joke in there, though. I sure didn't.
And try to sell Microsoft's WiX tools to someone in Germany. Pronounces like "wichs(en)", and I won't translate that...
(I'm rather surprised a big international company like MS makes such a mistake.)

While the name of GIMP is certainly an issue (and not one that should understated either!), I wouldn't say that it is the issue.

Until it recently shutdown here in Australia for decades one of our biggest retail names in consumer electronics was a company called "Dick Smith", and we have a brand of cheese here called "Coon". 'Difficult' names (putting it politely) can be overcome if there's something strong backing them.

As a qualified professional employed graphic designer, my 'professional' opinion on GIMP is that it's main problem is quite simply it's terrible UX design.

I would be quite happy to accept GIMP with it's current limitations and current features, if the developers would just spend a solid 2 years focusing on nothing but improving GIMP's UX. That's all it comes down to at the end of the day. It just needs a better UX, and simply renaming it and giving it a 'Photoshop-y' looking theme isn't going to achieve that.


Last edited by gradyvuckovic on 4 June 2021 at 10:35 am UTC

What I heard in the past about Gimp is that their developers are not, or at least were not, too fond on external contributions. Some even said they were difficult to work with.

The Gimp interface always generated complains. I remember trying to use it about 15 years ago for a simple drawing, and getting really frustrated. For example, to draw a simple line you had to hold the Alt(?) key plus the left mouse button. What is the need for that? Why not simply use the left mouse button like literally any other drawing program? So I learned to work with the much more limited Kolourpaint and never looked back.

While not exactly in the same category, the Krita painting program achieved a successful funding campaign. If I had to guess, they probably where much willing to give their users what they want.

For example, to draw a simple line you had to hold the Alt(?) key plus the left mouse button. What is the need for that? Why not simply use the left mouse button like literally any other drawing program?

You mean a straight line? Yeah, you click on a spot using one of the drawing/painting tools, then hold shift and click another spot. Ctrl constrains the angle. Without the modifier(s) you're drawing in freehand mode. I guess what you want is a separate line tool. Both get the job done, IMHO.

While not exactly in the same category, the Krita painting program achieved a successful funding campaign. If I had to guess, they probably where much willing to give their users what they want.

Krita is awesome for digital painting and drawing, but it doesn't come close for image manipulation. At least not yet. It simply has a different focus.

I edit my photos with Darktable and grab Krita if I want to doodle something, but there are tasks where GIMP is the best tool for the job on Linux.

For example, to draw a simple line you had to hold the Alt(?) key plus the left mouse button. What is the need for that? Why not simply use the left mouse button like literally any other drawing program?

You mean a straight line? Yeah, you click on a spot using one of the drawing/painting tools, then hold shift and click another spot. Ctrl constrains the angle. Without the modifier(s) you're drawing in freehand mode. I guess what you want is a separate line tool. Both get the job done, IMHO.

While not exactly in the same category, the Krita painting program achieved a successful funding campaign. If I had to guess, they probably where much willing to give their users what they want.

Krita is awesome for digital painting and drawing, but it doesn't come close for image manipulation. At least not yet. It simply has a different focus.

I edit my photos with Darktable and grab Krita if I want to doodle something, but there are tasks where GIMP is the best tool for the job on Linux.

Yes a strait line. Gimp is(was) full of those shenanigans, so I chose to abandon it for other stuff since it was a bit of a overkill for what I need. Not saying it was bad or anything, but it can got frustrating pretty fast if you come from other programs. Too bad the fork(s) that tried to fix the name and the UI never achieved much success.