2015 funding thoughts

Sven Langkamp sven.langkamp at gmail.com
Wed Oct 22 17:22:03 UTC 2014


On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 12:03 PM, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:

> 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!
>

That's sad, although I already feared that it would happen. I assume that
KO also will be getting out of the remaining Calligra too (not that much
anyway), right? Paying to you and Dmitry it certainly going to be hard.


> 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.
>
>
Any estimates for the subscriptions?


> 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.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------
> 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.
>

I think going forward the is one of the most if not the most imporatant
development, so it should get top priority if possible.


> * 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.
>

I think the animation support needs at least three months to fix the
remaining issues and integrate into the main application. The additions for
that project would be another 3-4 months.


> * 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.
>


Another big item is port to Qt 5 which should also happen in 2015. That
should take not that much time, but also needs to be scheduled carefully.

I think it's important that we go back to shorter release cycles as 2.9 and
not start too many projects at once. Ideally we would be ready to ship a
development project every 3-4 months. Currently we have sort of a mess due
to mvc and animation running concurrently. A shorter development cycle
would bring new features to the users faster.

I think we should also try Patreon. Form what I saw that seems to be a lot
more interesting for people than custom development funds. Looking at other
Patreon stuff it looks like the average is amount per person is about 10$
for bigger project and we would maybe need between 1000 and 1300 supporters
to fund everything, but 600 could get a half the amount already.
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