On separating Krita from Krita or not, the big pity is that KOffice has
the "Office" in it. If it were called anything else, just listing Krita
under the "K[whatever] project" would be just fine.

But I do think Krita would benefit immensely from being separated from
anything called "Office," if not in community, then at least in
appearance. There's nothing wrong with adding "Krita makes use of the
libraries of KOffice, and works closely with the KOffice community to
bring you features such as embedded KOffice document layers, but it can
also be installed as a stand-alone program."

Also, despite the "K" at the beginning, it'd be nice to not make it sound
so Kde dependent. Hell, I don't even use Kde. This is shrinking the
userbase (and potential developer-base).

On spinning off Karbon and Krita, my personal long-term hopes would be for
an entire open source Creative Suite ("OpenCreative"?), that would include
the following:
- The Gimp: high-end photo-manipulation
- Krita: painter program
- Karbon and Inkscape: vector illustrator programs
- Scribus
- and anything else you can think of (there Can be several programs doing
the same purpose, the user would be free to chose, as long as he can
easily access the choices from just one webpage).

Community-wise, the developers of the various programs don't have to work
too closely together. The alliance could be in name-only (though
eventually aspects such as interoperability would better be addressed),
but just having a central website saying "OpenCreative: the Open Source
solution to your graphic needs" would be a huge PR bonus. The central
webpage would link to the separate programs while explaining the usage of
each in a uniform manner.

Right now, let's face it... of open source programs, most people only know
Gimp (which, brilliant as it is, sometimes has UI reputation problems, and
can't be everything at once). The Gimp mailing list had discussed several
issues some time ago, and it basically came to the conclusion that it is
indeed primarily a photo-editing program, not say... a painter program
(which on the other hand is what Krita is), and so all the people asking
for painter features are basically barking up the wrong application.

Having a central page would benefit all the programs, by allowing the
developers to focus on the features their program Should be focusing on
(while allowing people to simply find other applications for their other
needs), instead of trying eventually to make their program a
"jack-of-all-trades" that tries (in vain) to satisfy everyone. The central
webpage could lead to stand-alone webpages for all I care, as long as it's
there to make the end-user's life easier when it comes to choosing.

Krita, as such, would also end up as "just one of the programs" listed,
but this is a perfect case of expanding the market, especially if the
website is done right. Potential contributors would also have a better
idea of what's available and which program they might want to contribute
to. The biggest problem would be to get all these projects to agree on
something like that... So in short, I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the meantime, at the very least, Krita should Appear to be a
stand-alone program, and not "part of some office suite that not everybody uses."


       
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