As far as I know you can’t really have a patent on something that does not cover a physical function (Does something happen when you press the gas pedal? Yes, the vehicle moves forward, then you can patent the gas pedal) <-- just an example
Though in America those rules don’t apply and you can patent a software feature (for example liquify) however those patents are not valid outside of the USA.
Work started a while ago, though I believe release of version 1.0 was delayed for several weeks :-
http://www.cinepaint.org/
Krita is looking like its pretty much eating everyone’s lunch here. 32-bit, opengl accelerated, great paint tools, high performance, growing list of filters, layer groups, etc. Give it another year or two of development and i dont see why anyone would use anything else (on open source side, anyway). What major features is krita lacking?
I really don’t get krita…I want to because everyone alwyas says how great it is but whenever I try it (from the ubuntu repositories) it’s been a messy bag of broken bits…
none of the tools do anything!
anyway., does Krita have layer groups? layer styles? content aware fill? normal map generation?
anywhere I can download a recent build for ubuntu?
gimp, inkscape and mypaint I’ve been using for years without issue.
Krita has pretty much replaced GIMP on my machine. Unified Transform tool and not having to deal with layer boundaries/anchor layers alone is enough for me. I have never understood why fixing those things is such a low priority. Even free html5/flash web based image editors have better handling of layers and transformations these days. IWarp is the only major thing I keep GIMP around for.
I wish them all the best, but it’s all kind of a decade too late.
There are now several alternatives that work well enough to the point where you could (almost) start thinking of using something other than PS for serious work.
GIMP is a poster child amongst Graphic Artists as to how FOSS can go wrong.
Tiny problem for Krita: unavailable binaries for a fringe OS called Microsoft Windows…
I was going to say the same…there is a build out there, but it is unstable…and sometimes I can not even get it to start…
and as far as Microsoft trying to eat linux up…that has come and gone a few times already(twice that I can remember)…
cinepaint is a deadend - it has a nonexistant developer community, and there hasn’t really every been much development behind it. Regarding Krita - Krita is a pure painterly program, for image adjustment and such (ie photomanipulation) it just doesn’t target those goals.
@ Tea Monster: What would you recommend ?
As FOSS i only know GIMP. What are the alternatives on Windows ?
For a -complete- image editor i don’t think there’s any alternative to GIMP as open source on Windows.
As closed source (was open source for a while but not anymore), there’s Paint.NET that is good, thanks to the myriads of addons to make it better and complete.
Now for painting, there’s the open source MyPaint that has a Windows version, and that has an amazing brush system much better than GIMP for purely painting, but it is nowhere near GIMP in term of image editing. .
@ sanctuary:
Yes, Paint.net is nice. It was my 1st choice image editor a while ago.
But image editing ? I see no other choice. And frankly GIMP is OK. I can only wish for more professional basics, such as CMYK and 16/32 bits.
MyPaint and Gimp are two different tools for two different tasks:
Sure, gimp has tools for content creation, but is not the task was designed for (that’s why gimp doesn’t excel at this, just have pretty basic tools for content creation). Same as Krita. It was an image manipulator, but developers decided that it was too much for what they wanted, so they removed certain features that belonged to an image manipulator ( http://blog.cberger.net/2010/03/02/the-difficult-choice-of-removing-features/ ) and converted krita into a painting program.
Many people prefer full-fledged image editing programs such as GIMP or Photoshop rather than pure painterly ones for content creation. Most of the time advanced brush simulation/management isn’t needed, but the editing features (selection, layers, etc) of more advanced programs are.
Yeah one of krita’s main issues is simply lack of availability. It seems that will be partially remedied soon for windows. I still dont see a mac version anywhere on the horizon however.
Seeing gimp go 32 bit and cmyk is great news however, dont get me wrong. But until gimp finds a way to eliminate layer boundries and add layer groups i will not ever be using gimp for much. Thats pretty much a dealbreaker for me.
Layer groups are already there in 2.7, so they will be present in 2.8 as well. 
Gwenouille: There isn’t anything that is FOSS and will do the job. The fact that it’s taken 10 years to implement and it’s a ‘Basic’ for Graphic Artists is the Poster Child thing.
The best thing I’ve seen out there is Paint.net so far.
It’s not just basic features though. It’s the macro function that allowed me to quickly set up different processes to process hundreds of images in a few minutes. Then there is the memory management on Windows. GIMP can’t even open half the files I was using at my last graphics job. If you fed it a 1 GB Tiff file, it would just cough and die, or if it could open it, you would wait 5 minutes for it to think about any actions applied. It just isn’t up to the job. I’ve tried it at 3 different studios and each time there is a major (and different) show stopper.
GEGL was started by the very same people who earlier created Cinepaint.
GEGL supports arbitarary color spaces via babl. Cinepaint doesn’t.
GEGL provides flexible graph-based processing. Cinepaint doesn’t.
GEGL does mipmaps. Cinepaint doesn’t.
GEGL does OpenCL based rendering and processing on GPU. Cinepaint doesn’t.
I could go on and on
Yes, I’m biased. No, those are all facts
Not really, no. It was resurrected around November last year. But, as far as I can tell, without any new features.
Not in 2.8, sorry. It was too late to get a new tool into this development cycle. But the tool’s developer keeps improving it, so it has a good chance of getting into 2.10 (or whatever the next version will be).