Press release
For immediate publication
In June 2004, the developers' conference for the well-known free software photo editor GIMP will be held at the GUADEC conference in Kristiansand, Norway. The GIMP developers are looking for sponsors, big and small, to help finance travel expenses and accommodation.
Currently, the GIMP community has received several generous donations from the Free Software Foundation and MacGIMP, and a Merit Award from OSI, but needs about 3000 US$ more.
Our goal is to have all the active GIMP and GEGL developers present at GIMPCon 2004 in order to chart a course for the GIMP for the next year and beyond. Having completely revamped its user interface in the most recent release, version 2.0.0, the plan is now to set the GIMP on track for a new rendering engine (GEGL) that will allow arbitrary colour depths and spaces.
Recently, the GNOME Foundation have agreed to help the GIMP developers by allowing us to use their existing donation structure, as outlined at http://www.gimp.org/donating/. There are now several ways to donate to the GIMP, via the GNOME Foundation: wire transfer, cheque and paypal.
If you wish the GIMP well, if you wish its development to continue full steam ahead, or if you enjoy the GIMP now, and wish to express that appreciation, donating money to the GIMP would be a good idea in our opinion.
The GNOME Foundation is in the USA a tax-exempt, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization; all donations are tax-deductible in the USA.
* GIMP (www.gimp.org) is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is free software for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.
GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.
GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms, but also runs on MS Windows and Mac OS X.
* The 5th annual GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC, www.guadec.org), will bring developers, GNOME Foundation leaders and individual, business and government GNOME and open source software users to Agder University College in Kristiansand, Norway.
The conference is a unique forum for highlighting the capabilities and direction of GNOME, the user environment for desktops, networked servers and portable Internet devices. GUADEC will also feature meaningful discussions of the future direction of Open Source development.
* The GNU Project was launched in 1984 to develop a complete UNIX style operating system which is free software: the GNU system. (GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not UNIX"; it is pronounced "guh-noo.") Variants of the GNU operating system, which use the kernel Linux, are now widely used; though these systems are often referred to as "Linux," they are more accurately called GNU/Linux systems.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF, www.fsf.org) is the principal organizational sponsor of the GNU Project, and supports the freedoms of speech, press, and association on the Internet, the right to use encryption software for private communication, and the right to write software unimpeded by private monopolies.
* The MacGIMP project (www.macgimp.org) is a collaborative effort to bring the gimp toolkit (GTK) and the GIMP to Mac OS X. It also sells the MacGIMP CD, a build of the GIMP for Mac OS.
* The Open Source Initiative (OSI) can be found at www.opensource.org.
This press release was written by Branko Collin, a GIMP contributor. It can be read at http://www.xs4all.nl/~collin/gimp/pr/guadec2004.html. (This is a temporary location that may cease to function after GUADEC 2004.)