Inkscape Board of Directors
February 2011
inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org
- 5 participants
- 2 discussions
Fwd: possible paid project
by Josh Andler
This is from Alexandre... I think he has some good points and wanted
to forward this on to the list.
Cheers,
Josh
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...23...>
Date: Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 12:23 PM
Subject: possible paid project
To: "Joshua A. Andler" <scislac@...23...>
Hi Josh,
This mail summarizes my current ideas regarding possible paid project
to improve Inkscape. It's also somewhat useful if you decide to
forward it to the Inkscape committee.
In the past the committee was strictly against paid work on Inkscape.
However we've been participating in GSoC from the very beginning of
the program in 2005, which is a lot about paid development, and last
year we had an extremely successful project with Tav to improve the
Text tool.
Right now we have a little over 13K on our account and we don't make
*any* use of it for the good of the project. The $316 that were spent
on travelling is really nothing in comparison to the whole sum,
contrary to what we state at the Donate page and to what I stated in
the interview to Packt Publishing last week. With all respect due,
this is nonsense. We are not some kind of a dragon that sleeps on a
hurd of gold.
So my proposal is to try doing a couple of paid projects like the one
we did with Tav. The money on the account aloows us to do that. But we
don't necessarily have to use the money on the account: SFC actually
can help us with another donation campaign, it's what Bradley told me
regarding the whole LinuxFund story (when the donations bypassed SFC).
If we do several projects, then we need both SVG compliance,
performance and new features projects to cover all angles.
SVG compliance project is an "old" idea to do a second project with
Tav. He was interested in that.
Performance is partly covered by Krzysztof's GSoC2010 project, but he
never really did OpenCL part of it that he was going to do, to the
best of my knowledge. At the same time some more bits of Inkscape
could still be improved. E.g. there are still canvas related issues
like infamous slowdown when doing rubberband selection over a bitmap.
"New features" project could be anything. We have geometry
constructions unfinished, PowerStroke LPE started, diffusion curves
started etc. I'd rather see one of our former GSoC students work on
such a project. We also have over 100 blueprints.
Why former students: because they are very nearly our only serious
force these days. The old team is mostly not around or busy working on
2geom. At least 1/2 of new features and refactoring changes come from
GSoC projects. The former GSoC students already know their way round
the codebase too.
I took liberty to talk to Maximilian Albert for a start. He still sort
of owes us finishing geometry constructions tool, but you know that he
had rather serious and understandable reasons to not finish the
project. He also wrote an interesting proposal for perspective drawing
that was later implemented in Adobe Illustrator CS5 in a rather
verbatim way. Max is interested in a project, but he wants to know
more about organizational part of work: amount of time to spend on the
project a week, scope of a possible project etc.
The other former students would be:
Johan Engelen. He was interested in a paid project before, but I'm not
sure about how much time he has now. Needs asking.
Krzysztof Kosiński. He recently wrote he was going to take an
internship, so maybe he won't be available till autumn.
Jasper van de Gronde. Not sure about how much time he has either.
Needs asking too.
Another possible project could be long overdue color separated PDF
exporting, but this means a prerequsuite of Cairo being able to do
that. It's a considerably expensive project (bulia estimated it it as
$30K back in 2008), and, what's also important, is that Jon Cruz is
currently on it, which is good and bad at the same time, because Jon
has the right understanding of what needs doing, but, with all respect
due again, I have my doubts that he'll be able to finish it any time
soon.
In my opinion if the decision will be to try doing two or three paid
projects, it'd be a good idea to wait till we know what GSoC projects
we have this year (if any), because e.g. Tav expressed willingness to
mentor a student re SVG compliance.
Proposed sequence of actions in case paid projects get green lights:
1. Talk to other former students whether they have time for a project,
and what project.
2. Talk to Tav if he's still ready to do an SVG compliance project in
case no GSoC students pops up.
3. Figure out how much money we can spend on each possible project,
scope and other criteria considered, whether donation campaign is
required.
4. Given p3, talk to Bradley@...28... about what exactly they can do
regarding donation campaign.
5. Wait till we know all about GSoC this year.
6. Consider 1-5 and take action.
Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org
12 years, 3 months
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Re: [Inkscape-board] Fwd: possible paid project
by Josh Andler
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 7:47 AM, Alexandre Prokoudine
<alexandre.prokoudine@...23...> wrote:
> On 2/3/11, Nathan Hurst wrote:
>
>> I'm with Ted, $13k doesn't go very far, even for student projects
>
> http://www.linuxfund.org/projects/inkscape/
>
> "Fundraising goal: $1300 – Raised to date: $1,415 "
>
> Project successfully finished by Tav.
I also want to mention the possibility of us doing more things via
linuxfund, and the project either matching a certain amount of funding
or filling in the gap after a certain amount of time. Lets be honest,
the compliance stuff isn't really all that sexy and someone like Tav
(who is ineligible for something like GSoC as a student) is willing
and capable to work on that. I'm also for hackfests, but I don't know
that many of our contributors would be terribly interested. Felipe
would be, and he loves hackfests... but, how many developers do we
have that would be into it and share interest/knowledge in similar
parts of inkscape?
Cheers,
Josh
12 years, 3 months
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