Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 14:20:35 +0200
From: Øyvind Kolås <--->
To: Mark Shuttleworth <--->
Subject: Re: GIMP bounties
Cc: Dave Neary <--->, Sven Neumann <--->

* Dave Neary <dneary@free.fr> [050914 15:17]:
> Hi,
>
> Mark Shuttleworth a écrit :
> >OK, then I am withdrawing the bounty offers. They have not delivered
> >progress in the many months since they were made. Please circulate this
> >to anybody who may have been a contender for those bounties.
> >
> >I'm open to proposals, but at this stage we have to call the first round
> >"defeat". Alas.
>
> Message passed along. It's unfortunate, but maybe it's for the best that
> we look for other ways that you (and others) can help.

My feelings with regard to these bounties disappearing are mixed. The
unfortunate portion of it is the fact that some incentives for work
might have disappeared.

My initial encounter with these bounties were when a small group of
people had set out doing something I am not able to consider, working
almost full time trying to achieve a set of milestones. At that time I
was just barely treading upon the ground that the bounties touched, and
was not an experienced enough graphics programmer to even see the
bounties are relevant to my own coding. Bounties of rather large amounts
of money being set up made it even clearer that GEGL was a territory to
stay out of; since someone considered it their job, and income.

Nevertheless I found some of the concepts of GEGL intriguing and set
forth creating my own minimalistic, non feature complete library with
similar functionality to GEGL, this project was called gggl, and lives
at http://pippin.gimp.org/gggl/ . It eventually became clear that the
people in charge of GEGL were pulling out. This put me in the position
of being the person knowing most about what GEGL might eventually become
like, since I had a working prototype implementation.

Fast forward some more to this spring, and a decision is made to start
cleaning up the GEGL code base, partly with the intention to keep the
bounties around, but mostly to contribute towards GEGL actually
happening. Getting GEGL going again without any of the original
developers around; proved to not be very easy, Sven and Mitch cleaned up
the source tree. I started refactoring things, trying to figure out what
needed to be done. GEGL is actually still in progress, but at the moment
I'm working on a reincarnation of an extended version of gggl's pixel
representation conversion capabilities, a library called babl
(http://pippin.gimp.org/babl/) which I estimate to be 95% done (thus 50%
done wrt time).

Why am I doing this? Why am I creating babl? Why do I plan to make GEGL
fly?

One thing is certain it is not to have the opportunity to write
milestones and roadmaps for a library I don't intimately know and have to
do administrative paperwork or such things, I get enough of those in my
day-job. Which also provides funds to pay my bills; and provides for
transport to some conferences each year.

I hack for the fun of it, and the idea that I have to come up with a
roadmap, and specify sub tasks and such for what needs to be done is not
fun, maybe someone else have the ability to work as software engineer;
doing project planning and scheduling and contribute to free software in
that manner. I am not that person.

Sincerly Øyvind Kolås aka pippin.


--
«The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed»
                                                -- William Gibson
http://pippin.gimp.org/                           http://ffii.org/