Hey Krita community members, I wanted to ask you something.
Actually, I have been using Krita for the past two years and I’m in love with it. I had downloaded it on my Windows as free software and honestly the number of features, tools, formats, and everything that it offers is really amazing which is not present altogether in any other software ever known. And as it is getting increasingly updated and improved with new features, I’m learning all of them and adapting to it.
But sometimes I get tensed that what if it becomes paid for everyone and students like me who have spent their whole art journey on it can’t be able to access it for free???
I’m getting more and more adapted to Krita and loving it very much. I really pray that it always be free and open source software for all those who are starting their journey or already established in the world of art and illustration and learning new skills as a hobby or passion.
But what if whatever I’m learning will get bounded by the paid version of future Krita? What if Krita becomes economic software such as Adobe’s softwares. What if students, new learners, or beginner artists do not get any further chance to have Krita for free use with all those numerous features, tools, and extraordinary resources???
Krita has GPL3 license. It ensures all past and future versions will be available for free - for both personal and commercial work.
Krita foundation does not own krita - it’s more of a public property that belongs to ‘us’ - the community (in fact, legally it has a few hundred ‘guardian’ owners to protect the license - but I’m not getting into legal details here).
As it does not belong to the foundation, it can’t change this license, business model, or sell krita to another company.
You are guaranteed to have all existing versions of krita for free, as well as everything that is public and uses it’s code (like future versions and other applications that derives from it)
Enjoy 
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for such a detailed and authentic response. It felt like you really understood what I said, and you responded with exactly what I needed. 
I think @wojtryb is not 100% correct in this, regarding the business model. (But don’t panic just yet! 
)
So, since Krita code is owned by a few hundreds of people, it’s realistically not possible to change the license. License is GPL3, or GPL3+ (I never remember). So it’s always going to be free like freedom.
The business model could, in theory, change at any moment. GPL doesn’t prevent that. However, even if it’s paid, every person who gets it should be able to get a full source code of Krita and can legally distribute both Krita binaries and source code to everyone on the Internet and anywhere else. (Detail: name and logo is trademarked, so it would have to ge rebranded, but the features could be all the same etc.). It’s like piracy, but 100% legal and even encouraged. It ensures the freedom that free and open source software is about.
But it’s all pretty unlikely as long as @Halla is the maintainer, and the Krita team looks like it does today. Look at Play Store, it’s the only store in which Krita is free. On other systems, it’s easy to get free Krita from the website, but installing apps on Android from outside of the store is more difficult so it was decided that it will be free but with an option to buy a “supporter’s badge”.
Basically there are ideological reasons behind Krita being free of charge. Some people wouldn’t be able to afford it, some live in economies with unfavourable ecchange rates, some don’t even have any compatible payment system, some are children - but there is value in allowing everyone access the software regardless.
TL;DR business model could change to require payment, in theory, but won’t, as far as I can say.
Though certainly some discussion about how to make Krita dev team financially sustainable in the recession could be had…
All free software (free as in freedom and not money) behave this way. Since many people come together and create it. It becomes sort of community thing. And to change the license all the contributors need to agree. Krita can be sold though, for example krita foundation sells krita on steam and Microsoft store, but no one can restrict it, so there will be always some source which will give it for free.
P.S. if it piques your interest, try reading about Free Software movement
So, it’s not at all like piracy really
I’ll give you some precedence of what happened when to open source software which was bought in the past to show worst case scenario.
Oracle ended up buying Sun Microsystems. With it they got OpenOffice and MySQL. They didn’t even become paid but no one trusts Oracle. Shortly after, they got forked and you had LibreOffice and MariaDB.
Same thing recently happened with CentOS. RedHat bought it and promised it would be same as Enterprise. But they broke their promise, killed CentOS and instead had CentOS stream as beta for enterprise. Shortly after, it was forked and AlmaLinux came and replaced CentOS.
So no need to worry
Just in case @Khandal or someone reading this is purely an artist and doesn’t know what “got forked” means, it means that someone from the community took the source code of that thing, rebranded it (changed name, logo etc.), and started developing.
From the graphics space, there was a similar case for Aseprite, which got forked at the last commit that was still GPL (the creator changed the license because he didn’t like how Linux distributions would package Aseprite for free without any way for users to even donate). The fork is called LibreSprite. It got forked by Godot guys so it didn’t have an active maintainer but it gained a maintainer last year or so and the development restarted (though probably quite slowly).
There was also similar forking with Audacity (because mainline Audacity got bought out and started including telemetry features), except that at some point 4chan trolls got involved and it was a disaster, and frankly, I’m not sure how it all ended up. (Ok, I checked: Audacium released one version, but is searching for a maintainer now; Tenacity seems progressing slowly (no releases yet, but there are nightly builds), and the 4chan troll fork died out, of course - and I remember how smug they were, “you’ll just see how OUR FORK will be the GREATEST OF THEM ALL, and you’ll be all sorry for how you didn’t like our name suggestion” (that inappropriate/weird name suggestion was the point of the trolling, so even people who thought it would be funny were annoye.d an hour later, of course)). It’s quite difficult to start a project and build a community and gather developers, even if it’s just a fork of an already existing project.
There is something that puzzles me and that is ‘Krita Studio’.
Here is the official website (not available in English:)
Krita Studio | Krita
Here is another site offering it but as free software (with what appears to be usual download link but from a ‘cdn’ subdomain if you use the link):
https://filecr.com/windows/krita/?id=6189853270
I’d noticed it some time ago. Can anyone explain what it is?
The site also only has French, Spanish, Japanese and Korean as languages which is another strange thing.
Apparently from what it looks like it was a commercial spin off with extra customer support.