Thoughts on Krita website presentation

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Tuesday 11 September 2007 16:36, Torsten Rahn wrote:

> To focus on professional image work you'd use a _real_ graphics suite
> instead (like the ones Adobe and Corel sell).

True, very true... Idem the bits I snipped. And I think the combination of 
Karbon (which has made fantastic progress thanks to Jan Hambrechts) and Krita 
could become a good contender.

And I've thought, often even, about what it would mean for Krita and Karbon to 
sort of split off from KOffice and form a second suite based on the same 
libraries and using the same plugins.

From a purely technical point of view, that's easy. It's what some 
distributions are doing already. 

From a labour-investment point of view, the balance isn't that easy to 
compute: we would need to invest time in a website, in forums, mailing lists 
and things like that. We could also gain, possibly, some more developers, 
people who share the artist's idea that being part of an office suite is 
boring. But we'd need manpower to perform the splitting task up-front. (I 
certainly do intend to make Windows and OS X installation packages of Krita 
(or Krita+Karbon+selected flake shapes) available separately. Those poor 
people have to do without the fine-grained auto-dependency packaging that's 
available on Linux. Whether I will have the time to do that, I don't know.)

At the same time, if Krita were Qt-only, we would gain even more acceptance, 
also from the Gnome world (which curiously enough welcomes Scribus almost as 
if it were a native GTK application). We would also need many more developers 
to replace all the functionality we'd have to add ourselves.

Developer manpower is the currency with which free software is paid, so that's 
important. Having more users does not automatically translate to having more 
developers: having more developers automatically translates to having more 
users. KOffice is a big project with a large developer community.

From a social point of view, I'm not sure whether it is worth going it alone, 
at this point. We have, despite some unfortunate spats, a great community. We 
share lots of code and ideas and we have the basics of an application suite 
set to beat Apple's iWorks at its own game. (And note how Apple re-uses bits 
of Aperture in Pages). All KOffice developers are not just adding value to 
their own application, but to the whole; I wouldn't want to disturb that. 

We might want to market the creative and productive parts of KOffice a bit 
more separately, after 2.0. We might want a better name for KOffice, which 
always reminds me of a terminal chain smoker, but in the end, I think we're 
not doing badly at all. News and info articles about free graphics software 
more and more mentions Krita as a separate and worth-while application.

And if it's needed, and someone steps up to do the work, a separate website 
about Karbon and Krita -- possibly with a catchy name like Kreative 
Komputing, and offering separated downloads of the creative parts of KOffice, 
will always be a possibility. Heck, the aforementioned hypothetical person 
might even coordinate with me and Cyrille about intermediate releases 
separate from the KOffice release schedule. Such things can be arranged, 
without outright forking.

But splitting away from the koffice subversion repository would be a Bad Idea: 
we gain so much from the cooperation in our developer community, technically 
and socially, that it would be a net loss for Krita to distance itself from 
that.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt 
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi
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