Sponsorship Affirms MacGIMP Project's Commitment to Open Source Graphics on Mac OS X

The GIMP Conference (GIMPCon) 2003 today announced that the MacGIMP project will be a sponsor for the 2003 GIMP Conference in Berlin.

Berlin, Germany (PRWEB) August 23, 2003 -- The GIMP Conference (GIMPCon) 2003 today announced that the MacGIMP project will be a sponsor for the 2003 GIMP conference at CCC.

The GIMP acronym refers to GNU/Graphics/General Image Manipulation Program and is the predominant tool for editing bitmapped graphics, such as are generated by common digital cameras, on Linux and similar open source operating systems.

"We are please to share the success of the commercial MacGIMP project with the primary GIMP development team and hope to do so again in the future." said Mat Caughron, leader of the MacGIMP efforts. "The GIMP project is in the top five most popular graphics editing applications on any platform. In addition to a large and growing userbase the open source nature of the project is destined to challenge the graphics software market, in the same way that Linux and Apache projects have challenged commercial operating systems and web server applications."

CCC is the Chaos Computer Club e.V.'s annual conference for internet and security technologists. Software developers from around the world meet to share information, socialize with their peers, and give presentations on significant issues involving the future of the software and internet usage. GIMPCon 2003 is one component of the open-air CCC event. Multiple conference tracks will address a range of topics from GIMP plugin development to general introductory sessions.

"We are happy to see the GIMP become adopted at large as a way to edit images, whether this is through commercial sales of packaged GIMP CD's such as the MacGIMP Project provides, or downloads of the source, which are available at no cost to everyone." says Sven Neuman, one lead developer on the GIMP project.

The GIMP project began in August of 1995 with Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis at the XCF Instutite in Berkeley California, and has emerged as a leading-edge graphics project for linux and other operating systems, including Win32, Linux, and MacOSX. The GIMP toolkit (GTK) was born approximately one year later. In May of 1998 the GIMP progressed from beta stage development to a stable "1.0" release.

Currently, both the MacGIMP project and the main GIMP developers work from the same source base, to prevent it from being fragmented by parochial interests. The GIMP features a plug-in system, similar to that in Adobe's Photoshop software, allowing for extension of the software by developers worldwide.

For more information, visit:
http://www.gimp.org
http://www.ccc.de/camp/2003/conference
http://www.macgimp.org