Comment Guess this means we're officially old (Score 1) 352
Peter and I created the GIMP to scratch an itch. In my experience, that's always the best motivation to start work on an ambitious software project.
We'd just gotten to the University of California at Berkeley. It was 1993. Pete was a freshman, I was a sophomore. Unix was new to us; we'd come from a world of 68K Macs and PCs running Windows 3.1. Berkeley opened up a wonderful new world of discovery. We were blown away by the Unix philosophy, the free software ethos, and the powerful tools whose fundamentals were just laid out in the open, begging to be understood and learned from. Richard Stallman was like some kind of God to us. We fell over ourselves to dump Windows and install Linux and FreeBSD. I even bought a used Sun Microsystems Sparcstation running SunOS 4.1.3. No day went by where I failed to learn something new.
But we missed Photoshop. Dual booting to Windows or keeping the old Mac around felt impure. Xv, xpaint, netpbm were all cool and useful tools but they felt limiting. So one night we sat down and wrote up a manifesto of what we wanted from such a program. I wish we still had a copy of that original document, but it's been long lost.
There was a point somewhere through the first year of development where someone else posted on comp.windows.x.apps mentioning their work on a remarkably similar application, but with even more features, and it sounded a lot further along with development. We were crushed. All of our excitement at our progress and hopes that we could make a meaningful contribution back to the community turned to ash in our mouths. We were listless and didn't work on it much over the course of a week or so, but then our original enthusiasm returned and we said, "what the hell..." and got back to work. We kept expecting the competing application to appear at any moment, but we never heard from that original poster again. So a word of advice: talk is cheap, ideas are cheap. Execution counts for everything.
Peter and I are still working together. More than 22 years now. We worked together at Google to build the Google Servlet Engine and Colossus. We've started two companies together, most recently Cockroach Labs to build CockroachDB: https://github.com/cockroachdb....
It's a wonderful thing to see how far open source software has come and how pervasive and influential. We stopped working on the GIMP in 1997 and it's only gotten better and better over the years. It's one of the first pieces of software I download when I get a new MacBook. Viva el GIMP! With luck, it'll see another couple of decades, or be surpassed by another ambitious open source project, brought to life by people who want to give back, make a name, or just solve a problem which won't stop bugging them.
We'd just gotten to the University of California at Berkeley. It was 1993. Pete was a freshman, I was a sophomore. Unix was new to us; we'd come from a world of 68K Macs and PCs running Windows 3.1. Berkeley opened up a wonderful new world of discovery. We were blown away by the Unix philosophy, the free software ethos, and the powerful tools whose fundamentals were just laid out in the open, begging to be understood and learned from. Richard Stallman was like some kind of God to us. We fell over ourselves to dump Windows and install Linux and FreeBSD. I even bought a used Sun Microsystems Sparcstation running SunOS 4.1.3. No day went by where I failed to learn something new.
But we missed Photoshop. Dual booting to Windows or keeping the old Mac around felt impure. Xv, xpaint, netpbm were all cool and useful tools but they felt limiting. So one night we sat down and wrote up a manifesto of what we wanted from such a program. I wish we still had a copy of that original document, but it's been long lost.
There was a point somewhere through the first year of development where someone else posted on comp.windows.x.apps mentioning their work on a remarkably similar application, but with even more features, and it sounded a lot further along with development. We were crushed. All of our excitement at our progress and hopes that we could make a meaningful contribution back to the community turned to ash in our mouths. We were listless and didn't work on it much over the course of a week or so, but then our original enthusiasm returned and we said, "what the hell..." and got back to work. We kept expecting the competing application to appear at any moment, but we never heard from that original poster again. So a word of advice: talk is cheap, ideas are cheap. Execution counts for everything.
Peter and I are still working together. More than 22 years now. We worked together at Google to build the Google Servlet Engine and Colossus. We've started two companies together, most recently Cockroach Labs to build CockroachDB: https://github.com/cockroachdb....
It's a wonderful thing to see how far open source software has come and how pervasive and influential. We stopped working on the GIMP in 1997 and it's only gotten better and better over the years. It's one of the first pieces of software I download when I get a new MacBook. Viva el GIMP! With luck, it'll see another couple of decades, or be surpassed by another ambitious open source project, brought to life by people who want to give back, make a name, or just solve a problem which won't stop bugging them.
