Has it been considered to send Krita to the steam greenlight?

Now that we have a pretty decently working windows version on top of the Linux version I think it could be cool, at the very least it'd be a free advertisement. (I never heard about this program anywhere, I found out about it in a reply from Deevad on one of his timelapses, I fell in love with it pretty fast, and I think it's a shame it's so hard to find.)

There are some drawing programs in the steam software store already (openCanvas and Black Ink which were both greenlit, this would fit right in). I also think Valve wouldn't dislike it since they're desperately trying to increase Linux's popularity, and I think this could possibly indirectly help them with that movement.

Thoughts?

Hi!

Yes! At KO GmbH (which is the company I co-founded), we've actually started working on that already. We're busy producing the materials for the greenlight submission, in fact, and setting up accounts and so on. We've had contact with valve and the like the idea as well -- especially since Krita Sketch or Krita Gemini should fit in very well with steamos/big picture mode.

However, we do intend to put a price on Krita on steam. We need to get some income out of Krita to fund development, and for Steam we intend to add all kinds of steam integration features. Everything will, of course, be open source under the GPL v2+, but our builds of Krita for Steam will not be gratis because we really have to find ways to make it possible to pay for KO's developers

Oh I'm very happy to hear this!

Donations can only keep you fed for so long. I don't mind a price either, as long as it's not steep. In fact, I'm all for it if it means more features and less bugs ^_^ (You're aiming to be a corel painter alternative right? You're doing a decent job so far too in my opinion, however on the linux build im not to happy about how a chunk of KDE needs to be installed to make the program work. )

We will still have the free version we have now right?

Since it's GPL v2+, there will always be a free version, since the source code itself is free and everyone can build and distribute it. When they sell it on steam, they're not taking money for the software itself -- they're taking money for the work done on distributing it on this platform, so to say. Because of this, the non-free-of-charge builds there are totally unrelated to everything else happening.
In that sense it's similar to the paid versions of linux distros out there (e.g. SuSE). All (well, sometimes they package non-free software, but almost all) software in the box is free, but you get a nice packaging and manual and that's what you pay for. In this case, you get a nice Steam installer and that's what you pay for.

In fact, you could yourself start selling builds of krita. The license is ok with that. You'd just have to convince people that what you do to transform the sources -- which are freely available -- into the product you sell is worth the money you charge for it. And you have to ship with the sources you used to create the very product you sell, and license them under GPL v2+ as well.

Greetings,
Sven

I couldn't have put it better myself

And indeed, Krita is now live on Steam Greenlight
With some great box-art from Tyson Tan of the Krita mascot, Kiki!