Today, on 21^st of November 2022, the GNU Image Manipulation Program turned 27 (cf. the first release announcement on 1995-11-21).

To celebrate, Aryeom (ZeMarmot‘s director) drew this nice birthday illustration (fully drawn within GIMP, and under Creative Commons by-sa 4.0 license, of course!):

For both Aryeom and I (Jehan), this is our tenth year of continued contribution, since a first commit in September 2012 (basic icon-changing patch in the animation playback plug-in, soon followed by more… many more patches…). Back then, never would we have imagined sticking for so long around this nice core community (regarding this point, we thank the other contributors for their welcomeness, and in particular the wonderful mitch) and contributing litterally thousands of patches in GIMP! So it’s also a pretty big personal milestone.

It is also my second year maintaining GIMP. And to be fair, Aryeom has a huge role in my maintenance with constant reviewing, testing my code (and other contributor’s code), following up with feedback, specifying behaviors (while always caring about others’ usage! One of her main rule when she helps designing changes is researching and wondering what worflows others have). So much is being done in the shadow to keep it all together.

But GIMP is not only us. What would we do without Øyvind Kolås in particular? Nowadays he is carrying most of our core flow-based graphics engine maintenance, GEGL, and its sister projects (babl and ctx).

Of course, I can’t forget all other awesome contributors: developers, packagers, community support, translators (GIMP is more than 90% translated in 27 languages among 84 languages we currently support!), documenters, website contributors, tutorial writers… We should also thank the GNOME Infrastructure team for being so helpful of course. And many many more! What would GIMP be without all of you? 💌

I will likely do a more detailed report later (like I did last year) to sum up 2022 events, so I’ll stay short in this news. For once!

All in all, we wish to remind that GIMP is Community, Free Software. It is what we make of it together. We welcome contributors very warmly 🤗!

Finally if you can’t contribute your time, in these year-end times of giving, don’t forget that you may support financially GIMP developers. GIMP project actively supports its contributors willing to make a living with their Free Software contribution. Right now it means 3 people: Aryeom and myself (through ZeMarmot project) as GIMP maintainers and Øyvind as GEGL maintainer. If you appreciate what we do and wish to give back, funding us is an excellent way. It is part of what makes GIMP development sustainable.

And for everyone who is really eager to see GIMP 3.0 out, it should go without saying that funding developers is what accelerates the development of GIMP.

🎁 So GIMP, and Wilber, we wish you a very happy 27! 🎂

And to every member of the community: thank you all for sticking with this project for all or part of these 27 years! GIMP would not be where it is today without all of you! 💌