He'd also need the GIMP devs to cooperate: to provide tangible feature sets with timelines, part time PR for updating and managing the Kickstarter campaign, and an part time CFO for managing the sudden influx and management of $360,000 (minus Kickstarter and the payment processor's share), dev salaries, taxes, and such.

I would be curious if the GIMP dev team could reach usability parity with Photoshop on only that money. It seems a bit on the low side frankly (about a year's time of a good developer and UX designer, plus support staff).

he could always fork it and pay for other developers if the core team didn't want to participate in this. You'd rather the core team's approval and participation, but you don't NEED it.

Call it Pimp.

I would say that I'm in too, but I also need a quality Illustrator alternative that works well on Mac.

To cacarr: Inkscape is not at its best in Mac. It's clunky because you have to use control instead of command, can't zoom with the trackpad, can't go fullscreen.

I use it and love it and it's one of my favourite programs, but really it's better in Linux.

A key mapping function sounds like one of them more easy things to add into a piece of software

I assume you've tried Inkscape?

If you don't get their support, then that $400,000 has to go a lot further (or you have to work towards a branch reconciliation at the end of the work). Ongoing maintenance is not free.