July 2025 - Inkscape Board of Directors

Developer Meeting Notes: July 29th 2025
by Martin Owens 29 Jul '25

29 Jul '25

Hey Devs, Today's meeting was very light. Just me and Mikekov. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ Next: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ We talked about his recently landed object properties branch into main and what to work on next. Also talked about the road map team and some of the considerations for what that would look like. Mike raised a concern that our reimbursements for Nuremberg were delayed getting processed. One thing I think might help for next time is a small spreadsheet we can share which has all the voted on numbers, and names of people. I, someone else, or Roseanna could pop the numbers in from the reimbursement claim to see if they check out more quickly. We talked about color (I always talk about color), I'm mulling over hosting a video conference between various free software devs working on color in their projects. Might be fun, might be useful. That's it for this week! Best Regards, Martin Owens

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VOTE: Refresh Promotional Materials
by Ted Gould 20 Jul '25

20 Jul '25

Background Vectors has used up their supplies in EU and wishes to create a cache in India for events, first being IndiaFOSS. Details are available in this message from Maren. https://lists.inkscape.org/hyperkitty/list/inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.or… Note, I added a little over their estimate to ensure currency exchanges, tax, etc. Don't become an issue. Votes a ) Authorize up to $150 for Maren and $150 for Ishaan to spend on materials for promoting Inkscape in their respective regions b) Authorize $x and $y for promoting Inkscape in the regions c) Something else: __________ Timeline Vote will be closed July 11th, 2005

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GitLab Opensource subscription
by Martin Owens 19 Jul '25

19 Jul '25

Should we be doing something about the message on GitLab that says: """ Your Opensource subscription will expire on 2025-08-02 Your Opensource subscription for Inkscape will expire on 2025-08-02. If you do not renew by 2025-08-16, you can't use merge approvals, code quality, or any other paid features. """ Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Time sensitive vote: Inkscape Bengaluru Summit 2025 (India)
by Martin Owens 18 Jul '25

18 Jul '25

Dear PLC, This event is soon, so I'll close this vote as soon as possible. Ishaan and Vaibhav are putting together a small India based summit and they need fuunding for travel and hotels. We've been helping them put this together for a couple of weeks to get the details right. Attached is the full details, it's expected to be a 5 person event with a cost of $370 per person total, that includes a ticket to attend IndiaFOSS 2025 where they will have a booth. Venue is $655 for the 4 days. And there's a request for $70 to have a screen at the Inkscape booth at fossIndia. Total cost: $2575 Please consider approving the budget for this event in this vote. a) Approve the budget as given b) Amend the budget like this _____ c) Do not approve this request Thanks for your time. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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VOTE: Website Upgrade
by Martin Owens 18 Jul '25

18 Jul '25

Dear PLC, For your consideration is the budget for hiring the SFC's website contractor to help coordinate with the OSUOSL, deploy a new machine and deploy a new version of the website. The estimated costs are $1,200-$1,600 for the work, I'd like to budget $2k to cover any unexpected costs. (see attached) VOTE: a. Approve the use of $2k for website work. b. Something else c. Do not approve Best Regards, Martin Owens

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VOTE: Mastodon Hosting
by Ted Gould 18 Jul '25

18 Jul '25

Background Inkscape has had it's account on Mastodon.art. Because of various moderation decisions there and elsewhere in the Fediverse having an account there has been more work, and has less reach than we'd like. Instead of choosing another server that may end up in the situation the proposal here is to create one using the the Inkscape.org domain and could host our news feeds. This would hopefully allow us to steer clear of politics in the Fediverse and provide an authoritative account at our domain. To do this we are suggesting using masto.host, a popular Mastodon hosting service that is used by a large number of services and is located in the EU. We reached out to the maintainer and he said with the number of followers and the number of servers we connect to, we would probably need the $20/mo option. We can adjust that in the future based on our usage, but this proposal goes with that recommendation. Assuming this proposal is approved the next steps would be to get SFC legal to review the terms of service from masto.host and ensure they are okay. Then have SFC setup the admin account and create the accounts that Vectors requests (or other teams?) for posting. Then we'll migrate the current Inkscape account to the new setup. Votes a) Approve SFC to setup a recurring payment to Masto.host for up to $25/mo for the purpose of Mastodon hosting on the Inkscape.org domain b) Approve hosting on masto.host but at the $_/mo level c) Approve switching to hosting on our own domain but think that we should maintain the Mastodon instance d) We should instead move our account to: _________ e) We should keep our Mastodon account where it is f) Something else: __________ Timeline Vote will be closed July 11th, 2025

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Inkscape Website
by Martin Owens 09 Jul '25

09 Jul '25

Dear Board, I would like to request a budget on behalf of the website/infrastructure team to pay for someone to perform and complete our website upgrade. # Background Now that the ~1.4.1~ 1.4.2 release is done, we can finally deal with a backlogged infrastructure issue. Which is that the website is not currently able to be updated¹. This has happened because the version of the website has been upgraded thanks to work by @pgcd² to move us to a much more modern version of django, django-cms, python etc. As well as fixing up the test suite from multiple mutations. But this work can't be deployed to our webserver. The webserver is also old, and part of the discussion with OSUOSL was upgrading this machine to something newer. They'd like for us to have a machine they control and simply have us deploy our code and data to the new machine. But this comes with a lot of extra hand holding to make sure the web server machine, and a lot of the configuration we've set up on live to cope with bad actors DDOSing our site. As well as doing all the necessary bits to make sure the site is actually deployable in a hands off way. We can't deploy any new fixes to the website until this is unblocked. (For example the recent request to make news articles set in the future, not appear to be published, when they are't (yet)). # Request I'd like to hire pgcd to finish up the work. Partly this step requires someone who can be trusted, to have access to machines, or data, and I'd prefer if that person was legally bound to do the right time. And this is the sort of thing that I'd ideally like us to pay for anyway. I haven't put together the scale of budget this might require. But I think $4k-$6k would be a useful amount to pay for hours necessary at the standard SFC rate. Including having the contractor talk with and coordinate with OSUOSL and cut out some possible bottlenecks when hopping through volunteers. I'd like the new site to go through Fastly CDN for all pages. Not just media pages. So coordination with a new configuration on Fastly will also be needed. Plus testing of a testing site. I'd also like to include the creation and testing of data backups. Something that scared the daylights out of me with our current situation. # Final Thoughts I haven't sent this as a vote as I think it needs a bit of mulling over before we bring it to a vote. So let me know if you can, I'd like to get this sorted out soon though as the target for a test website deployment shouldn't wait until we're in the middle of a new release. Thanks! Best Regards, Martin Owens ¹ Except for some small tweaks which are kept out of tree, Which I don't like doing. But were needed for the DDOS protections. ² See https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape-web/-/commits/master

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UX Proposal meeting
by Daniel Pono Takamori 04 Jul '25

04 Jul '25

Here's a poll for the UX proposal meeting: https://starbestfit.com/inkscape-ux-proposal-839429 Will check in Monday and send out a good time for everyone Monday evening (UTC-7). Thanks! -Pono

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