[Toutouxc]

> You will find very few people with this kind of full-stack understanding of light and color able to also write efficient computer programs and read academic research papers on applied mathematics. Yet, you will find a lot of image editing applications and a lot of guys trying…

Wow, I'll have what he's having for confidence.

On the other hand, open-source photography and bitmap editing is still waiting for its own Blender or Godot and I applaud anyone willing to have a go at it. What's available (GIMP, RawTherapee, darktable, ...) can mostly sort of get the job done, but if you're the kind of person who seeks relaxation, pleasure and aesthetics in photography, the open-source software feels just too geeky, too unfocused, too unrefined.

I'm currently on DxO + Affinity and even though they cost quite a lot of money, I'd probably shoot and enjoy the whole thing significantly less if I had darktable and GIMP waiting at home.

[ska]

> Wow, I'll have what he's having for confidence.

It's pretty common with open source projects. The people with time, energy, and an "itch to scratch" and the people who really know an area aren't disjoint sets, but people who fit in both are rare. Lot's of projects like e.g. GIMP start off making mistakes that would have been obvious to someone who understood the domain well, but the team makes them because they are learning as they go.

[hatsunearu]

Once you try it, and read his blogs about how all of this shit works, you'll know that he isn't exaggerating.

The amount of control and physics-based editing you're doing is very unique.

This wasn't what darktable was like a few years ago, but this guy has been making incredible strides to implement his vision.

[jillesvangurp]

Very much so. That, and he's French. The French way of critiquing is a bit different from what other cultures do and can be a bit abrasive. Cultural differences are a thing to be aware off when dealing with people from different nationalities.

He means well and is deeply passionate about this stuff. He's worked his ass off in Darktable for many years. One of the few (only?) developers that was trying to do this full time on donations, etc. He's the closest thing Darktable had to a benevolent dictator style leader (like Linus Torvalds). Big loss for the project to not have him around. I hope they can reconcile their differences somehow. Would be best for all.

Basically, what happened is somebody pushed through something that in Aurelian's mind were some severely misguided, low quality changes without much debate or process. It just showed up and he flipped out and did not appreciate being bypassed/ignored like happened.