I love that they are also selling the software in stores (MS, Steam, Epic). You don't get anything extra apart from the automatic updates but it's certainly a nice way to get people to pay for your FOSS project.
I wish more project would do the same. I know the stores take a cut but my guess would be that it's easier to make people buy there than make them a direct donation for example.
I follow their updates semi-regularly so I'm not sure if they made a more recent one that was as detailed. I found a tad depressing to see how much Steam purchases are making compared to donations.
Right, I remember the issue... which I think got you to do the proper setup of the Krita foundation to avoid any similar issue (which may have been quite some work and accountant fees).
Thank you for your work, by the way. Krita is one of the things that make me the happiest, with Linux itself. It's such a well-designed software, and it's such a pleasure to paint with it.
> I found a tad depressing to see how much Steam purchases are making compared to donations.
Why's this depressing? They 'charge' a reasonable price on Steam for those who want to either support the project or get automatic updates or both, and the developers for this open source project get funded without having to actually paywall the product. Seems pretty good all around to me!
I think it's the same situation with companies paying for software from a company they already have a spending relationship with instead of trying the competition. You lose a lot of people when you ask them to get their card out for yet another entity. It's easier to buy into the nth AWS tool, or Office 365 app, or Steam game than to take a chance with some new person's grasp on security and privacy.
Aseprite calls itself "source available" now. Their license has a "no redistribute" clause, so if want to use it and can't compile it yourself, you have to buy it.
I spent about an hour trying to compile it on Windows a few months ago, couldn't get it working. Can't remember why, maybe most of that time was installing requirements.
From memory, one of their dependencies (maybe skia?) was a gigantic pain to build. I also wasn't very familiar with ninja, and couldn't debug some of the ninja output from cmake.
Doesn't really matter because I already had a license, but it would have been interesting to play around with the internals.
Decompilation is not the same as source availability. Any binary can be converted into source that will compile back into a (nearly) equivalent binary. Whether that source code is economically viable to use in some derivative work is an entirely different question. It might be easier for .NET binaries to be decompiled but the point still remains that machine generated source code is not the same as human generated source code.
There is a colossal difference between attempting to decompile a native binary (using a tool like Ghidra) and decompiling a .NET binary. .NET binaries contain all the information necessary to express the original program, except for local variable names.
You are left with something highly readable that will build correctly. Unlike native code disassemblies which need to guess at data types and stack usage.
Back in 2019 they mentioned that "Krita has gone from 2 to 4 full-time developers over the last 10 months, and Steam has been instrumental in raising the funds to make that possible" https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d2ic2e/krita_is_now_...
I wish more project would do the same. I know the stores take a cut but my guess would be that it's easier to make people buy there than make them a direct donation for example.