2015 funding thoughts

Wed Oct 22 10:03:55 UTC 2014

Hi,

Pretty soon, KO GmbH will be out of the Krita business. The Krita Foundation will take over Krita Studio and Krita on Steam, so customers don't get screwed. But one of the reasons KO GmbH is going out of business is that we never made the income needed to make the company break even (let alone profitable). That doesn't bode well for the Foundation, either. Pretty soon, either the Foundation has to be able to pay me a living income, or I'll have to go and find another job. Krita development _will_ slow down considerably then!

So, here's a plan I've been preparing for next year. Part of it is about invigorating the development fund subscriptions part for individuals, part of it is an attempt to figure out how to get companies to take up responsibility one way or another. 

I see two possibilities: make a second development fund subscription for companies that includes all the Krita Studio perks (stable builds for CentOS, Ubuntu LTS and Windows, support when needed), and I've got a list of four biggish projects that should be of interested to studios especially. 

Please help by going through this proposal and suggesting ways of making this more attractive -- then I'll send it out to all the contacts I've gathered over the past year and see whether we can get something going!

(Note: I've sort of fixed a month of development work at 5000 euros. That's awfully cheap in a commercial setting, but it's sort of realistic for a non-profit like the Krita Foundation, I think.)

I'll also post this on the forum.

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The Krita Foundation: the next steps

Krita has been developed at break-neck speed in 2014. We released Krita 2.8, with a host of new features, performance improvements and bug fixes. We made the first port to OSX available. We brought Krita to the Steam platform. We are on track to release the next version, 2.9, which will have among other things a greatly improved transform tool (cage, liquify, transform masks, perspective transform and more) and improved compatibility with Photoshop files. 

However, developing Krita at this pace means we have to fund developers to work on Krita full-time. While there are many volunteers who dedicate their spare time to Krita development, with only volunteer contributions, development would be much slower.

Currently, the Krita Foundation earns about 500 euros a month through donations, sale of DVD's and the development fund. We made an additional 19,000 euros this year through the Kickstarter campaign. Krita on Steam makes about a 1000 euros a month right now, but for the moment, that money comes to KO GmbH, not the Krita Foundation.

In order to continue its work, the Krita Foundation needs at least 10,000 euros a month. Given that Krita is already in wide-spread use, with plenty of opportunities for growing much larger, that should be doable.

I want to invite individual artist to join the Krita Development Fund: currently we get 100 euros a month through the development fund. Any amount, from five euros up makes a difference, because it makes for dependable income that we can plan with. 

For companies, I want to create a new subscription model that will take the place of the Krita Studio license KO GmbH offered. It will still give access to Krita builds for CentOS 6.5 and Ubuntu LTS, as well as Windows, and support with bug fixes and installation help.

There are also four development project that I want to invite companies to subscribe to:

* LOD performance optimization: this will bring Krita's real time painting performance up to par with Photoshop, or even go beyond that. There is currently a proof-of-concept, but it needs at least four months of work, about 20,000 euros.

* Animation: make the animation plugin ready for the real world.

We have an initial investment from Eric Lake's project together with http://songoftheamazon.com/the-film/. We should consider doing a crowd-funding campaign to double their investment. This needs about 3-4 months of work, so 15,000 to 20,000 euros.

* OSX: the OSX port is experimental and needs work to be ready for end users:
  * port remaining dependencies (HDR painting, optimizations)
  * fix OpenGL
  * fix popup palette (currently now shown when OpenGL is enabled)
  * implement Wacom support to replace Qt's built-in tablet support.
  * polish gui inconsistencies
  * fix resource handling

This needs six months of dedicated development, so about 30,000 euros.

* Scripting: a proof of concept exists of Python scripting support for Krita. The goal is to enable both writing gui extensions for Krita as well as automate image manipulation actions. 

This needs three months of development, about 15,000 euros.

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-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org