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Ansel is not a hobby project. It is a working tool designed to get job done, and the pact commits it to responsibilities a hobby never carries. Funding is your side of that pact: the project answers for your needs; its workers' conditions are, in return, partly yours. What is the difference with a hobby project?

Chores

Planning for long-term maintenance, stability and robustness implies doing chores, like refactoring code, simplifying the programming structure, and identifying what features need to be pruned. In addition of being tedious, these chores are often unpleasant, as they don’t involve any creativity and don’t produce any cool new feature that will boost marketing, but often require to understand some tangled and messy code written as someone else’s Saturday project.

It’s just boring responsible management, yet time-consuming. But someone needs to do it — and it is precisely the work that never gets rewarded by applause, which is why it must be rewarded by something else.

Design

Design is what happens when you search for the simplest, minimalist, solution to somebody’s problem. Design requires the designer to understand the problem from the human perspective, and to know the available technologies well enough to find out the most suited one.

The opposite of design is blindly “adding support for …”, which implies you cram your application with as many features as you can, until you can’t maintain it anymore and you move on to the next project. This is called feature creep  and its effect on people is called feature fatigue . It harms both projects and people.

Here again, the task is time-consuming, in addition of requiring a special set of skills (engineering) that require time themselves to master. It goes way beyond the mere ability to write code, most of it actually happens before any code is written, and when properly done, it also reduces the amount of code needed, thus helping maintainability.

Overhead

The product is never the product, the product is always the service in which the product is a key component. Delivering some software as an installable executable is not so hard. Thinking that alone brings value to people is being deluded. Providing user support in a timely manner, user education and debugging is the hardest part, as it is a recurring task and a cognitive load, but that is required so users can actually get the job done.

Responsible management

Ansel has:

• a developer documentation to help contributors avoid reverse-engineering the code and to help long-term maintenance,
• automatic camera support updates,
• many other automation tools to help maintainability and debugging,
• a much reduced code complexity ,
• a written design protocol and triage rules, so decisions can be checked instead of guessed.

All this may sound cryptic to most users. It just means the maximum was made to help stability and debugging, even for contributors who are not familiar with the code base, therefore reducing the bus factor .

You can be a part of that

The kind of individuals that have the professional skills mentionned above tend to find well-payed and stable job opportunities. If they are already practicing their skills professionally all week long, chances are they want to rest from them on the spare time.

That’s very bad news for open-source/libre applications because it means they are left with random contributions from amateurs, resulting in a long-known problem: open-source applications are the half-baked, lower-end alternatives to their commercial counterparts, being open somehow making it tolerable to a minority of users who value privacy over getting their job done.

Open-source needs to pay well to attract skilled engineers, in order to produce industry-grade applications. It’s really not rocket science: people need to pay their bills first. Then perhaps work on cool stuff if they can. Not the other way around.

By financing Ansel, you are making it possible for the maintainer to put the required time on fixing things properly and on solving your actual problems, without having to live in financial stress. You are also giving other engineers incentives to do the same in other projects by demonstrating it is possible.

You are contributing to a culture of fair work retribution in open-source, which too often relies on exploiting free labour and precariat.

You can donate through Liberapay .

Thank you.

Note: Ansel was founded by Aurélien Pierre, who worked on Darktable from the end of 2018 — author of the darktable UCS 22 color space, of modules like filmic, tone equalizer, color balance, diffuse & sharpen and lens blur, and of the scene-referred workflow, in addition of having refactored the GUI code to allow user-defined theming. Ansel was forked from Darktable 4.0 when its development effort dispersed into peripheral features whose cost — in maintenance, in usability, in working conditions — nobody was accounting for (the full story). The project is now carried by its current maintainer, whom this page supports.