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by defective 2557 days ago
Over 20 years ago, Matthias Ettrich made a Qt GUI for GIMP. GIMP community apparently didn't like him doing that, don't know why. It may have had something to do with licensing -- at the time the Qt license meant it wasn't free software and there was some drama about KDE becoming popular when it was using Qt and thus a large component was nonfree. I know these facts separately and do not know if they are related, but it seems like all that stuff was happening in a few-months span in 1998. Someone else would have to elaborate more if they remember anything.

https://krita.org/en/about/history/
1 comments
jhasse 2557 days ago
> It may have had something to do with licensing -- at the time the Qt license meant it wasn't free software [...]

So the fork basically violated GIMP's license, right? I think it's very far fetched to conclude "GIMP crew will happily throw a hissy fit at any fork" from that!

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defective 2557 days ago
I don't think they even forked it necessarily, and the Qt hack/patch wasn't even published. It was just presented at some Linux thing. This was the only story I could find that resembled a reason for inferiorhuman's prejudice. There are also hundreds of current existing GIMP forks, and no evidence that the GIMP crew is gearing up for street violence.
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prokoudine 2557 days ago
Unsure if inferiorhuman and defective are the same person, but this is so much fun.

1. Pick a story from 20+ years ago.

2. Pretend you are talking about the same people (they aren't).

3. Pretend they never changed their opinion about anything (they did).

4. Post a comment that suggests nothing changed since 1998 (it has).

My goodness, some people on the interwebz...

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defective 2557 days ago
I'm not sure I follow your logic, but if it helps clear anything up, I did emphasize that this was an old story, like twice. I am also aware that Qt is GPL now, and that GIMP has hundreds of forks.
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prokoudine 2557 days ago
I don't think you really mean this literally. Hundreds of forks... :)
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defective 2557 days ago
333!

None of which really compete, but yeah, literally hundreds. Just one big one though, GIMP Painter.

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prokoudine 2556 days ago
You are looking at the wrong number :) That's the total amount of forks on GitHub. Whereas only 15 of them had any commits by people who forked the repository. Among those 15 people:

- One is a regular GIMP contributor.

- One couldn't wait another day for a macOS build of version 2.10.12.

- One patched file association on Windows and submitted his patch to the upstream project.

- Some of the others worked on their pet peeves, and some of them discussed it on the upstream bug tracker.

You might want revisiting your definition of a fork :)

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