I worked with Boudewijn and the rest of the Krita team during two Google Summers of Code, and I still remember the great experience. It was only a few years later that I fully understood how much patience and commitment they put into my contributions (it was my very first programming "job"). They helped me grow as a developer, and taught me how to work in a team.
Boud is not only a great developer: he's been a great teacher, and a wonderful person. He even sent me a letter with one of his favorite books, and I still have it in my library behind my desk :)
I am really excited every time I see new progress on Krita, it's a really good piece of software, and its developers always like to take new challenges.
I met Boudewijn Rempt at a free software conference in Brazil a couple of years ago. Although I only know him from talking at a conference and not from working together, I was impressed with his good nature and his commitment to his project and his community. It seemed to me that the free software community would be lucky to have more project maintainers like him.
The history of Krita is briefly mentioned in the interview - I think I first tried Krita around 2005 or so. At the time, it was basically KDE's GIMP as part of KDE's productivity suite (which kind of sucked anyways). That put it in an awkward position of competing head-on with the leading Linux image editor, targeting mostly the same user base, and that basically made it unattractive to users.
With a focus on digital painting, however, it has a great niche. It now performs great on an area that GIMP never really focused on and it's a very feasible goal to be on par with or better than Photoshop on that particular aspect. That way it can be "a great painting program" rather than "Photoshop but free".
I'm seeing a lot of digital artists love it. Krita blog does regular artist interviews. Instead of PS, though, it's an alternative to Corel Painter or similar drawing/painting software.
For digital painting it is absolutely awesome. I have discovered it a couple of months ago, and I love it. It enables me to paint on linux without having to use buggy Photoshop with wine.
I'm really happy with it, it has everything I wanted out of painting software, and it works extremely well.
It's come a LOOOOONG way in the past three years. These days I would say it's roughly equal to the capabilities of Photoshop for digital painting/illustration. It's still not that stable on Windows, though.
I work with a few professional artists who prefer it for certain kinds of work over Photoshop. It seems like one of the few open source products that can really compete with the Adobe/Autodesk giants.
It's my go to app if I'm on Linux. I don't use it much on Windows because I do have a full creative cloud license, but I use it a lot at work on centos.
Boud is not only a great developer: he's been a great teacher, and a wonderful person. He even sent me a letter with one of his favorite books, and I still have it in my library behind my desk :)
I am really excited every time I see new progress on Krita, it's a really good piece of software, and its developers always like to take new challenges.
Congrats to Boudewijn and to Krita!
Emanuele