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Comment by Benjamin_Dobell | Hacker News Reader

> ... will use the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together

$100k is a sizable donation. I would have hoped that it could do more for the project than update some hardware and organize a hackfest. That's not to say donations in general shouldn't be used for those things. I just would have assumed that a donation of this size would have been best utilised as salary/salaries, allowing contributors to focus a more significant portion of their time on GIMP, and be compensated accordingly.

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1) Hardware upgrades catapult productivity. Ever gone through the sheer hell of developing on a sluggish, over-taxed computer? For a project like this, the faster build times alone will make HW upgrades worth it.

2) This team has proven their dedication by sacrificing immense time & opportunity - some of them, for years - to work on this fantastic gift to the world. Not that it's your call, or mine - the $ was given to them, not you or me - but I say let 'em spend it however they see fit.

> 2) This team has proven their dedication by sacrificing immense time & opportunity - some of them, for years - to work on this fantastic gift to the world.

I don't disagree with this one bit.

> Not that it's your call, or mine - the $ was given to them, not you or me - but I say let 'em spend it however they see fit.

I'm just postulating, not complaining. Surely that's acceptable.

You're also assuming that all the developers absolutely want to spend the money this way. There may well be a core contributor willing to do more, but uncomfortable with idea of suggesting they take the money, and is too scared to speak up. If there is such a person, I say "go for it".

yeah but 100000$ is a big one. You can buy a very good build machine for 10000€ esp. if you rent it and paying a few trips to a hackfest and a small venue is certainly not 90000$... So even if it's none of my business, it does raise questions.

but well, Gimp as served me well, has been there so long that the only thing I can say is kudo's to the devs. they could even pay themselves a bit, that'd well be deserved.

GIMP's financials are included under the GNOME Foundation's 501c3 filings, so you can take a look if you're suspicious.

GNOME in total last year only spent $110k on salaries with $300k in revenue (also they had $670k in the bank). Based on their past filings, they look pretty fiscally responsible.

Wait, why are large sums being donated if they have half a million just sitting around? It's an open source project, not a corporation that has a millions in turnover and needs half a million as buffer for a bad year.

GIMP is obviously useful so I'm glad they have money to use, but if they are already decently covered, there are a thousand other important projects which could benefit from donations. When compared to letting half a million sit in a bank somewhere, I am wondering if this was the best purpose for the money.

In Europe (and I guess, the US too), $100K is not even enough to hire an engineer at an average rate for a year.

I'm not sure what you'd propose to do with it exactly?

I'll just quote myself:

> allowing contributors to focus a more significant portion of their time on GIMP

I never said anything about hiring full-time engineers.

Also, there are plenty of people willing to be paid a little less to work on something open-source, and something that they take great pride in. We have to be careful not to take advantage of such people, but some people are in a position where they can afford to earn a little less to do something they love.

If I was not already busy on something else, I would have worked at 60/day, a day a week on that kind of stuff for the very reasons you describe ! (well, except I don't know anything about gimp's internals :-))

I don't know where you work but there's plenty of places in Europe where you can hire a decent engineer for $100k a year.

What the company pays and what the developer receives are two very different numbers. In extreme cases the difference can be up to 30%.

Nah, there are plenty of places in Europe when a decent engineer earns $100K/year (or less). That's not what the enterprise is paying.

But a developer working full-time on a single project for an entire year can make a huge difference (compared to only user contributions, or 1 person extra on a 20-person project). If there aren't a dozen other full-time developers, you're saving loads of time on meetings, product planning, and everything involved. So even if I would agree that it's not enough for a full year, it's definitely enough for most of a year, with similar results.

If you want to raise $100k directly for GIMP development, it is already possible. See the Patreon pages linked here: https://www.gimp.org/donating/

If the core team members would use a gimp salary to buy new hardware, is it functionally the same. They can properly support more devs with hardware, than they could with a salary. I like that they want to use the money communally.

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