I’m just giving everyone here a heads-up that I’m moving the Discourse forms to https://community.mypaint.app from https://community.mypaint.org. The minor reason is that the .app domains require websites to use https. The big reason is that I’m trying to consolidate everything to make mypaint easier to contribute to.
For the past few years, MyPaint has been in a stalemate kinda situation where it has been getting harder and harder to make changes and deploy a new version of the application. It is also getting to the point that the mypaint is going to start breaking on Linux which is its primary platform. Though with Flatpaks and appimages around, that going to help stave it off for some time, but it is going to happen.
So with that said, my main goal this year is to get mypaint back-end infrastructure back to a point where contributors can start working on it. The domains have been a pain point since technically one person owns the domain and another is maintaining the DNS and email. It has been difficult to try to coordinate changes with either person since they technically have moved on to other projects and have other priorities in their lives. I’m not angry at anyone just frustrated about how tangled everything is. Sadly to untangle something you have to work at it one strand and knot at a time, and that is the frustrating bit for me. I’ve also been frustrated with myself since I let this get to the point that the mypaint.org domain got hijacked and though we didn’t lose any data, it still stung. I would hate this project to slowly wither away and I’m sure plenty of you feel the same.
So with that said, I am sorry for letting this stagnate for so long, and I am going to do my best this year to get the ducks in order. MyPaint is one of the applications where you can just drop in and just draw and has always been the app that bridges beginners and professionals alike. I would like to keep that going with this project and I hope you do as well.
If you would like to help, mypaint does have a open collective account at MyPaint - Open Collective. Right now I’m going to be using the funds raised so far to pay for all the costs to bring this all together. In the long run, I would love to raise enough funds to actually hire a future developer. The awesome side is that open collective is making changes to make that a real possibility. If you are a current contributor, or interested in contributing code to mypaint, be sure to check out our github repo at https://github.com/mypaint/mypaint and help me consolidate issues, and help address the pull requests that are pending. If any previous contributor has an online account that is part of MyPaint infrastructure, please contact me. My Github profile is odysseywestra (Albert Westra) · GitHub which has my email or you can DM directly here. I’ll also be reaching out to you as well so please keep and eye on your inboxes please.
Edit: I created a Project on our Open Collective Page detailing on what I plan on doing. If anyone has any ideas of other back-end work that needs to be done, please let me know down below.
