[Promotion] free desktop contests

[Martijn Klingens]

On Saturday 25 February 2006 13:58, Thilo Pfennig wrote:
> I am not so sure if GIMP can not be compete with Photoshop. Maybe not
> in the professional environment where companies are EXPECTING
> Photoshop documents - but on a very practical level. You do not have
> to set the limits where Photoshop stands but make some general tasks.

Well, in a professional setting (artists, advertisement agencies, printing and 
pre-press) the features I listed are must-haves. Of course you can say that 
I'm "setting the limits where Photoshop stands," but the more truthful 
statement is that Photoshop offers what the market demands (and much more, 
which I didn't list, and which is less important for us before we can start 
competing with Photoshop).

> I have not seen a real comparison that besides of the color management
> makes real good points in the comparison. GIMP primarily should try to
> solve 99% of the graphical tasks done around the world, we can compete
> woth the 1% ultraprofessional tasks later.

For people who work with Photoshop professionally those are everyday tasks, so 
if we want to compete with Photoshop in that market it's part of the 99% of 
graphical tasks.

And competing with Photoshop beyond the professional market is a bit useless, 
since those people use illegal versions of Photoshop for sure. Plus, they are 
most likely using Photoshop because they consider it cool to use the most 
powerful app on the planet, since those people SHOULD be using Adobe 
Photoshop Elements or one of the competing applications from other vendors. 
In that market Gimp and Krita already *can* compete feature-wise, and 
applications like digiKam can somewhat compete on the usability level.

In that regard we shouldn't position Krita and Gimp as Photshop competitors 
(which they really are not), but as competitors to Photoshop Elements, or as 
more generic high-quality paint applications for the hobbyist market. That 
would be a message that journalists would buy, and it would make for fair 
reviews. A review against Photoshop will also be a review against Photoshop's 
target audience, which we will lose.

> > And if Adobe doesn't release a Photoshop for the free Linux and BSD
> > desktops soon they might not even need to.
>
> I think people who are able to bux Photoshop will also be able to buy
> a machine that runs Photoshop.

That's not what I meant. I meant to say that if Adobe waits long enough there 
will be a Free software alternative and by then there will be little reason 
to shell out 2k Euros for Photoshop anymore.

> > At the current pace of development I expect
> > Krita to be quite close to Photoshop by the time the KDE 4 version comes
> > out,...
>
> Well that's not that far away if October 2006. If we talk about it now
> we might be able to have an event like this 2007.

I don't expect KOffice for KDE 4 to be released together with KDE 4 itself, 
not to mention that we haven't decided whether we will release KDE 4 around 
our usual schedule in October, or take a bit of extra time to do more library 
rework now we have the opportunity to break the ABI and release around Q1 
2007. The time frame I was talking about is roughly Q2 2007. In the mean time 
there will probably be standalone Krita releases though, and that app is 
developing at such an insane rate that it might be ready to take on Photoshop 
even sooner. I really wonder when the Krita developers sleep, considering 
there's only a handful of them and they still churn out major features by the 
week [1] :)

[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/view/bolsh/2005/12/15/1

> I may be wrong but I think sometimes it is also a good idea tom
> compete even when you think you will loose.

I'm unsure about that. Yes, it means that people will remember your name. It 
also means that people remember the bad review though, and history has shown 
that such old perceptions are sometimes very hard to kill when they are no 
longer true.

> Anyway, I would like to collect some more ideas about how those contests can
> be done. Somebody can go back into the archive to grab the ideas we have now
> even if those events will be deferred.

That's definitely a good idea to prepare in any case. I can't help you with 
that though, so I hope others can jump in here.

-- 
Martijn