Some News About Your Donations
Date: 2021 / 04 / 01
(This is not an April Fool!)
Since March 2019, we have set up a donation system for G'MIC, which allows users who are satisfied with our software to support us by sending some money to the project. On one hand, this (clearly) encourages us to continue our development efforts. On the other hand, donations could be used in the future to finance the purchase of hardware, travel to conferences related to free software (e.g. for presenting the advances of the project), or even recruit interns to speed up further development.
As it was not legally possible for us (the GREYC laboratory where G'MIC is developped) to directly accept small donations, we have set up a collaboration with the non-profit organization LILA ("Libre Comme l'Art"), which is able to collect donations and transfer them back to our lab via a "grouped" payment.
You may already know LILA, whose members Jehan and Aryeom are highly involved in the development and improvement of GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) and who are also the people behind ZeMarmot, a nice project of 2D animation movie, to be released under Creative Common by-SA/Art Libre licenses and fully made with creative Free Software (GIMP, Blender, Ardour…).
Fig.1. Gmicky (left) and ZeMarmot (right), collaborating to support the G'MIC project!
(Image by Aryeom, under CC by-sa 4.0 license).
This has been a long time coming, but we are happy to announce that, finally, a first transfer of 4500 € of donations has been made by LILA to the G'MIC project last month, corresponding to the donations received since March 2019!
Fig.2. Love you all, dear G'MIC supporters!
We do not yet know exactly how this money will be used, but we wanted to take this occasion to thank once again all our supporters who made this funding possible. The fact is that now, we can actually use this money for the G'MIC project.
Thanks also to Jehan from LILA, who accepted to manage these G'MIC donations. Also a special thanks to Sam from FOSSHUB, a recurring donor who also offers us an efficient hosting service for the files we provide for downloading.
Fig.3. Donations received month by month, since January 2020.
For now on, we are trying to finalize the next G'MIC version (v.2.9.7) (see the current state of the changelog).
We already had a lot of exciting news lately :
A bunch of new image filters to play with.
Our plug-in G'MIC-Qt is now supported on GIMP 2.99 (development version of GIMP 3), as well as on Photoshop, Affinity Photo, and theoretically all 8bf-compatible hosts (thanks to respectively Jan Tojnar and Nicholas Hayes who made this possible!).
A new markdown parser that will be used to improve our reference documentation and tutorial pages (work-in-progress).
And of course, a lot of bugfixes (that we do not always make appear in the changelog due to lack of time 🙂 ).
We are trying to fix the few remaining bugs, in order to have a really stable 2.9.7 version to propose soon (hopefully).
Until then, let us thank you again! … And stay safe!