What is GIMP?

GIMP is an open source image editor and photo manipulation program available for free at gimp.org. It’s been in development since 1995, and recently got some great features, like non-destructive effects, good support for CMYK, and many, many usability improvements.

GIMP 3.0 has been in development for the past 10 years, and it is nearly ready to replace the 2.10.x series. The first Release Candidate for 3.0 is expected to land this month or the next month if they’re on schedule. The first public release will be out in a few months.

GIMP’s Funding Structure

GIMP is free (although you can sell it), and the developers who work on and maintain GIMP are doing it of their own accord. They aren’t being paid by an organisation to do so. It is possible to fund GIMP in several ways to accelerate development.

If you wanted to donate to GIMP, how would you do it?

You’d likely land on their Donate page, which gives you all the details.

You have a number of options:

• You could fund Jehan, a core developer and the current maintainer for GIMP, through ZeMarmot, an open movie project. Some of the money will go toward GIMP development, and some of the money will go toward the film. Work on the film will help GIMP development because new features need to be developed and bugs patched in order to make working on the movie possible and smooth.

  You can choose to donate through either Liberapay or Patreon. Liberapay doesn’t take a cut, but Patreon does.

• You could fund Øyvind Kolås, who develops GEGL, which is “GIMP’s image processing core”, through either Liberapay or Patreon.

• You could donate to the GIMP Liberapay organisation, which divvies out the funds between the core developers of GIMP. Liberapay doesn’t take a cut in transaction fees, as a non-profit itself. This is probably the best option.

• You could donate to the GIMP organisation, handled by the GNOME Foundation. These funds can only be used for “community needs”, like conferences and purchase of new hardware. This is probably not what you want.

This is quite confusing, and you really have to think about how best to donate. It’s not like Godot’s donation page, where you just decide what amount you want to donate, and you can be assured it’s going to the right place. There’s a donation option for GIMP that most people probably don’t want to use, but might pick mistakenly if they misread it.

It’s a problem that the people who work on GIMP are aware of, and are attempting to fix by creating the Wilber Foundation. Once they have a foundation, they can centralize the donations in one place, hopefully using their own platform so they don’t need to cut Patreon in on the action, and finally distribute the over $1 Million US Dollars worth of Bitcoin to GIMP’s contributors which they cannot currently access due primarily to legal constraints.

Nonetheless, GIMP gets an impressive amount of funding considering how confusing their funding structure is.

How Much Funding Does GIMP Get? (As of March 7th, 2024)

Zemarmot’s Funding

ZeMarmot’s Liberapay account currently earns 275.99 Euros per week. This adds up to 1103.96 Euros per month. Converted, this is about $1,837.53 AUD.

ZeMarmot’s Patreon account currently earns $1,730 AUD per month.

This totals to $2,833.96 AUD per month, or $34,007.52 AUD per year.

Keep in mind that these numbers are changing all the time, so the total amount might be more or less, but contributions to the Patreon have been trending upward for a long time, though have remained relatively stable for the past year.

Øyvind Kolås’s Funding

Øyvind Kolås’s Liberapay account currently earns 126.97 Euros per week, or 507.88 Euros per month. Converted, this is about $848.62 AUD per month.

Øyvind Kolås’s Patreon account currently earns $2,103 AUD per month.

This totals to $2,610.88 AUD per month, or $31,330.56 AUD per month.

Keep in mind that these numbers are changing all the time, so the total amount might be more or less. Contributions to the Patreon have been about the same for a long time.

GIMP’s Liberapay Account

I don’t know how this interacts with the other Liberapay accounts, because it adds up to less than the amount ZeMarmot and pippin are getting per week. I assume it only contributes a fraction of the total, so I’m completely ignoring this in the calculation.

GIMP’s GNOME Foundation Account

The numbers are not easily publicly accessible, and don’t qualify as direct contributions anyway, so this is not included in the calculation.

Total Funding Per Month and Year

Combining ZeMarmot’s and Øyvind Kolås’s donations together, we get $5,444.84 AUD per month, or $65,338.08 AUD per year as of March 7th, 2024.

Keep in mind that these numbers are changing all the time, so the total amount might be more or less. The Patreon numbers, at least, seem relatively stable based on Graphtreon’s data.

When GIMP establishes their foundation and dramatically simplifies their funding structure, the amount of donations will probably greatly increase.