Ironic: a rant and rave about how it's important to keep Paint.NET free so it can be maintained and developed by the community unlike the now more-restrictive Paint.NET license by Rick Brewster (author).

OpenPDN repo history: initial commit, circa 2009.

Pretty sure that doesn't even qualify as a fork!

It's there if you want to help :)

The reason it was forked is due to people selling recompilations of it.

I'm curious, how does this compare to something like The Gimp, which I've always considered comaprable to Photoshop in almost every way)

Paint.Net has many fewer features then Gimp, but the features it does have are fast, clean and simple to use (for reasonably small files). It's my go to tool on Windows for basic editing tasks.

It's missing fractional selection and per-layer alpha channels. With those two features, it would be almost usable. Without them, most photo editing tasks are highly difficult.

Fractional selection lets you apply adjustments and effects without harsh boundaries between the adjusted part and the unaffected part. Per-layer alpha channels are needed to blend together different layers smoothly. And actually, you could implement the effect of the former with just the latter.

So yeah; Paint.NET needs editable per-layer transparency channels.

I mean comparable, in the sense that it has a similar set of features, and allows you to perform similar tasks with similar amount of effort.

I love the Gimp.

I never ever try to say it's comparable to Photoshop.

Really, there's a whole bunch of stuff which is trivially easy in photoshop and not so much in Gimp.

That can only be true if you choose to ignore a lot of photoshop features.