- Inkscape Board of Directors

VOTE: 2025 Inkscape Summit Frankfurt
by Jonathan Neuhauser 09 Dec '24

09 Dec '24

Dear all, ==== Background ==== In the past, Inkscape has chosen to fund conference costs, including venue, hotel, and travel expenses. I'm organizing next year's summit in Frankfurt, Germany; it's in the week after FOSDEM (Brussels) Sun, Feb 02 - Fri, Feb 07, 2025. Eligible to attend are all Inkscape members as defined by the Membership policy. More details: https://office.inkscape.org/nextcloud/index.php/s/gYgteYQ6k7dGJqp The budget covers a total of 15 participants. Until now, I've received 6 registrations; the list of participants already makes me optimistic for a productive summit - although I do hope that a few more participants will still follow! The summit has an estimated cost requirement of 15,000€ for up to 15 participants. Hotel costs for 15 participants, including full-board meals, conference room: 5411 € In the past, the project has also offered reimbursement of up to 1000€ in travel / visa expenses, to be reimbursed to each attendee upon submitting of travel receipts. Note that there is no per-diem, as all expenses are included with the accommodations. Attendees are asked to choose economical means of transport. The vote is for 6,000.00€ in funds to be allocated up-front with the expectation that receipts for rooms, venue, and any remaining balance will be returned upon conclusion of the event. Up to a further 9,000.00€ in travel expenses, to be reimbursed after the event, under SFC’s net30 (days) reimbursement policy, to be refunded to attendees upon submitting receipts for these expenses to SFC. If possible, it would be nice if Pono could again book the flights directly. (For reference: https://alpha.inkscape.org/board/referendums/resolutions/2023_Hackfest_Bens…) ==== Ballot ==== Budget a maximum of 15,000€ for the Frankfurt Inkscape Summit, organized by Jonathan. a) Approve this budget b) Disapprove this budget c) Alternative Best, Jonathan

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Financial Report for 2024
by Martin Owens 02 Dec '24

02 Dec '24

Dear Inkscape PLC, We've finally got data from the SFC on our donations for 2024 and the financial report is updated on the website here: https://inkscape.org/budget/inkscape/ You can see that we have basically held steady over the year, spending $34k on programming services, $6k on conferences/travel and $1.5k in hardware. So overall we've spent less than half of the amount in 2024 we spent in 2023 for each of the above mentioned categories. It would have been higher for hardware but the hardware program failed at the SFC level. I think we have room to pay for more code in 2025 as our peace-chest remains at $360k. There's some outstanding contracts such as the one for the AI importer completion. Donations are averaging $3-$4k per month, a total of $47k for the year. It's very low compared to other sizable projects but we do have room to ask for more contributions in 2025. These are some of the choice comments from this year's donations: 102, Thank you / Great software 66, Contribute to Inkscape (generic or unlabeled) 12, Keep up the great work 3, Company/Gov support * Nice program except for text on Windows 11. * Make Inkscape more stable, good luck and good job ! * I want to thank you for developing Inkscape and prefer it over Procreate. Thank you * Thank you for the free software for me to use for my personal project. * Thank you so much for your amazing work! I apply Inksacpe for teaching Critical Cartography at the University. * Thank you for all the great work you do! I only use Inkscape once or twice a year, but I am greatful for this program each and every time. I hope my small donation helps to keep your efforts going. * Hey! Inkscape is great. Here’s the 1 month Adobe Illustrator subscription I saved by using it. * Amazing software. Just what I was looking for. Thank you! Shout out to TJFREE for his Inkscape tutorials. * Mahalo nui loa! Keep on keeping on * Thank you for making this tool available to us. I use it for my reports, journal articles, etc. * Thank you for Inkscape. LONG time Corel user saying no to subscriptions only. * Just a small thank you. I know it's not much but I want to contribute to keep open source truly open source. * Inkscape is wonderful software, runs flawlessly on even my ancient laptop with a 5th gen i3! Easy to use. Thanks for your work * Muchas Gracias por su ayuda a la comunidad * I thank the developers who made inkscape. I hope this helps them in developing that amazing software. * For Inkscape helping a prospective keyset designer * Great work on v1.4 , your team makes wonderful art projects possible. =) * Hello, I really like Inkscape and want to support. Can you support also crypto donation? * I, just want thank you all for your hard work. Your software helped solve a design problem I had. Still learning. . . thanks * i'll give you more when I have it. Adobe is the enemy of the artistic community, so I'll use Inkscape and give you the money instead. Thank you, thank you, from all the artists and budding artists out there * Love the embroidery plugin! Have a good 2025! * sliced pan bread goes in the toaster SIDEWAYS * Thank you for making this free so this old lady can craft for her kids. Appreciate all you do! * Thank you for making this software available to us "starving artists" * Thank you! I am tired of paying Adobe a monthly rent to use the same core features that I've used in Adobe Illustrator for 30 years. * thanks. So nice to have a decent illustrator alternative. * The software was easy and fun to use so I hope to contribute a bit to its development. * This software has brought me joy.

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Meeting Notes: A new chapter for Inkscape
by Martin Owens 27 Oct '24

27 Oct '24

Meeting: A new chapter for Inkscape, a project-internal discussion Date: October 26th 2024 Attending: Pono, Adam Belis, Martin Owens, Jonathan, Ishann, Elendil, Itlnx, Marc Jeanmougin, Michele, PBS, Rene Secretary: Martin Presiding: Jonathan This will be a brief presentation of the work in progress, this discussion started with Rene, Martin and Jonathan and this isn't meant to be a decision but an opening of the discussion about. # Presentation Jonathan presents a slide-show. An introduction to what a fiscal host is. It's a type of abstraction layer which surrounds legal and money issues. You probably aren't in contact with the fiscal host as a normal contributor, unless you are on the board (project leadership committee). They are responsible for taking in donations, and paying out the infrastructure and other costs of the projects, taxes and other compliance. The next thing is legal matters, such as trademarks, copyrights and any conflicts that might arise in law. A fiscal host can also be involved in hiring, contracting, and being a HR in some cases. Most jurisdictions require the project to maintain a democratic structure. Inkscape is currently hosted by the SFC, a 501.c3, they do not have to pay certain taxes but in order to get this there are very strict rules and that the organization is run in the public interest and can not be involved in the regular commercial market. How this works is that the FSA / Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement is a signed contract between the project leadership committee and the SFC as the fiscal host. This involves a 10% cut of our donations (pono: this is much lower than industry average) in exchange for the services provided to the project. https://inkscape.org/*leadership-committee/charter/ Why would be look beyond the SFC? The SFC has repeatedly failed to deliver on promises and duties, which have been poorly defined sometimes. Issues range from programs like the hardware program failing; not updating accounts in a timely manner and becoming unresponsive to important and time sensitive work. Other issues are structural which are specific to being a US based non- profile despite Inkscape being a mostly European project now. This causes problems with donations as well as being inaccessible to certain countries. Restrictions to what payment methods we can achieve. (pono: apologize for the failures to deliver, and relates the on going work to improve the payment infrastructure including Patreon) Comparison to Other projects. A fairly large project which used to be an SFC member but which created their own organization. There is a feeling that Inkscape might have simply outgrown the infrastructure of the SFC. (pono: git and openwrt are comparable size to Inkscape) We have certain role models to look to for comparable projects: * Dutch non-profit: Krita, Blender, Godot * German foundation: The Document Foundation * German non-profit: KDE, Drupal, Codeberg * French association: VLC There are various jurisdictional considerations when following these examples depending on what we want. Risks of moving: There are certain considerations when it comes to moving. Transferring of funds needs to be agreed upon and it has to be done in accordance with the law. Possibly taxes on income depending on the jurisdiction we set up an organization in. Administration overhead: we have to everything ourselves or pay for it for example a tax consultant. Most likely we would end up contracting more. The board (of the association) becomes personally liable for any law breaking as there would be no legal office checking on decisions. What the project needs: The project dictates what it needs from the organization, not the other way round. An organization which is transparent and would be friendly to open source. Build a new organization with a bootstrapping team, transferring resources etc. # Discussion Pono adds context: It required a year of full time staff in Godot. The transfer required specific legal and other work. He thinks Inkscape should stay with the SFC. It would be less optimal to setup a separate organization, but the SFC would support the project moving if the project as a whole voted for it. Michele, thanks Jonathan for presenting the topic. She asks pono if a part of the discussion should be about making a list of things that the SFC would have to do in order for Inkscape to stay with the SFC. Martin adds his own perspective on working with the SFC to push it forwards and how frustrating it is to have a list of things the project needs and not having them dealt with for years and years and restarting the process would be ignoring the considerable effort already made. Pono would like to have a long term planning meeting, even if we end up leaving the SFC, a long term planning meeting would benifit the project so everyone knows what's going on. What the project wants for itself. Marc wanted to bring up the situation in the EU about setting up an organization as well. Adam Belis, worries about paying tax in the EU and then paying again the SFC which is a kind of tax so doesn't know if this is a good idea. Marc would see the ability to depend on the SFCs advice as being valuable. Jonathan adds that having a separate organization would cause a problem with moving money around and the SFC would end up having to control the EU organization. Martin adds his discussion with Godot about how their SFC pool was used to pay contractors, while at the same time their own organisation would building up it's reserves. It's possible to have two pools of money doing different things without having a complicated dependency. Adam asks about the details of each jurisdictions and Jonathan goes into some of the pros and cons of each type/class and country. Michele: Before spending on lawyers, we would need to better understand the project and goals for the next few years. In addition to understanding basic budget requirements for such an idea. The idea is not bad, we need to have much more information prior to making a decision. Itlnx: The unresponsiveness alone is a good reason to move. Martin adds that if we're talking about project goals, we can measure success by how easily it is to invite users into participating either time and skills or financially and being able to get recognition for that contribution. If we don't have a robust financial infrastructure, we can not grow into the kind of project that involves users in the process of building Inkscape. Jonathan wraps up the project by thanking everyone and inviting those people present to have a think about what we might deal with. Most of the people in the meeting were sympathetic to the idea of making a new organization, but have questions about the risks involved. Rapid fire: - Adam likes the idea, would like to see more fleshed out options; thanks for the meeting - Martin thanks everyone for being involved in the discussion professionally. - Rene thought we were on an uptick with our relationship with the SFC during the last hackfest; but it seems to have slipped back to a feeling of frustration. There will be a lot of costs with doing this, we aren't driven away from the SFC by the costs, but by the ability to get things done. - Krlr17 as an observer, it might be nice to have an organization especially with the latest issues getting hardware. We don't want to loose volunteers in this process. - Marc thinks most of the difficulties with the SFC can be resolved, but having an EU organization still makes sense for many reasons. An agreement between an EU presence and the SFC would be his preference. - Michele asks if we can't grow within the SFC then it's good to have the discussion. What does the project look like. She would like to see a Project leadership team that was better able to make a stand and make decisions firmly. She warns everyone that having an uncoordinated effort for information might not be as useful as suggested by Jonathan. - Ishann asks that whatever we decide to do, we should remain a welcoming project. - Pono, having a long term plan for the project would be beneficial. He notes that a lot of the failures have fallen on him personally. An idea might be to hire a project administrator to take a lot of the tasks we might be having issues with. Finally; everyone (at the same time) said that pono is not really directly at failure and that there are structural issues which limit how much work the SFC can reasonably offer and Inkscape will continue to put demands on the SFC they might not be able to meet. Pono ends by saying that "We should all be so lucky to see our children grow up and go to college; a project like inkscape growing up is a part of life for this really important project" The meeting is wrapped up with a poll about what the next steps should be. Thanks for reading. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Vote: Apple Developer program
by René de Hesselle 27 Oct '24

27 Oct '24

Dear all, Background: ----------- Creating properly signed and notarized releases for macOS requires a paid membership in Apple's developer program. This membership comes in the form of a yearly subscription. So every year we get to decide anew if we see enough value in signing macOS releases to warrant the expense of 99 € that comes with it. It is possible to distribute and use unsigned apps on macOS just like on Windows. The downside is that a user has to take additional (but not overly complicated) steps to make this work while macOS itself discourages people from using unsigned apps. Proposal: --------- We've been creating signed macOS apps since 1.0 and I propose to continue this practice at the expense of 99 €. Additional information: ----------------------- Whatever the PLC decides in this case here is ABSOLUTELY IRRELEVANT to my purchase decision. I am buying this either way. The question is only if I'm going to use it for Inkscape or not. Votes: ------ a. Agree to spend 99 € on the Apple Developer program ("I want signed macOS releases") b. Disapprove participation in the Apple Developer program ("I do not want signed macOS releases") c. Other: ________ Best regards, René

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Contributor T-Shirts for 1.4
by Martin Owens 20 Oct '24

20 Oct '24

Dear Inkscape Project Leadership, # Background I have ordered 24 t-shirts featuring the design for 1.4 on white cotton. The design is meeting with approval from people who have been asked and I would like funding to be able to send these to members and cover their production costs. See photo of me wearing t-shirt here: https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_vectors?msg=hLavFfkSrbdd95HF5 Sizes available: Unisex Medium=3, Large=7, XL=6, 2XL=4 Women Medium=1, Large=2, XL=1 I'll be making them available to contributors who are members of the project and who have been active during the 1.4 release (so over 2023 and 2024) in any area, not just code on a first come first served basis. Logistically, I have them here now and I will be sending them out one at a time to people's addresses directly from here in the USA. If it's cheaper, I may request a European plc member to take a batch of them but I'll document that if it happens. Each shirt will cost $12 plus I'm estimating $20 per delivery cost (though I expect that to be widely variable). The project only needs to buy the ones I send out to contributors. # Vote Budget $900 to cover the maximum possible costs of sending out these shirts, the amount to be less than this once they've all been sent out and delivery costs are known. a. Approve of t-shirt budget b. Disapprove c. Something else I abstain from the voteas the t-shirt vendor 😅️. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Inkscape 1.4 released!
by Marc Jeanmougin 13 Oct '24

13 Oct '24

================ = Inkscape 1.4 = ================ Thanks to all the work from our community, we are proud to announce that Inkscape version 1.4 is now released. ---------------- You can find out about the new features at: https://inkscape.org/news/2024/10/13/inkscape-launches-version-14-powerful-… and download it for your platform on: https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.4/ then, if you want to support Inkscape, donate to the project at https://inkscape.org/support-us/ ---------------- Inkscape 1.4 is the latest major release of Inkscape, following more than one year of development after the 1.3 major release, and paving the way for the next version of Inkscape. The highlights of this release are: - Filter Gallery: it has never been so easy to find the best filter for your needs! This new dialog features previews, categories and search. - Modular grids & improved axonometric grids: set the grid angle by ratio for isometric designs and use modular grids to plan layouts and make icons! - Swatches dialog and palette file handling improved: quick access to dialog layout controls, search for colors, and open different palette file formats! - Unified font browser preview: when activated in the preferences, use it to quickly browse through your font collection. Try it out and give your feedback! - Customizable handles: Power users with CSS knowledge can now customize the styling and basic shape of all the handles! - Fast image clipping with the Shape Builder: raster graphics can now be clipped into multiple sections using the Shape Builder. - Affinity Designer File Import - Support for internal links in exported PDF files - A whole new icon set - There's even more: faster extensions, new templates for folding booklets, additional options in Ruler and Taper Stroke LPE, new keyboard shortcuts, changed node deletion behavior, preview in Spray tool, many new command line options, more supported color palette formats (e.g. CIELAB, Adobe Color Book and Adobe Swatch Exchange), updated translations and many bug fixes. The new features are showcased and illustrated at https://media.inkscape.org/media/doc/release_notes/1.4/Inkscape_1.4.html . ----------------------------- Join an Inkscape project team ----------------------------- Inkscape is always happy to welcome new contributors in various areas: code[1], translation[2], UX[3], testing and bug triaging[4], documentation[5] or even outreach[6]! The main ways to get involved are listed onhttps://inkscape.org/contribute/ The preferred points of contact are: [1]https://lists.inkscape.org/postorius/lists/inkscape-devel.lists.inkscape.… + https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_devel (or libera.chat/#inkscape-devel) [2]https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_translation [3]https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_ux [4]https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_testing [5]https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/documentation [6]https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_vectors A warm thanks to everyone involved in making this release possible! -- The Inkscape team

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The Next Stage for Inkscape
by Martin Owens 04 Oct '24

04 Oct '24

Dear Inkscape PLC, We have just had a meeting between Martin, René and Jonathan about the future of Inkscape with the Software Freedom Conservancy. Recent events have convinced us that the project needs to graduate from the SFC in order to allow the project to grow. And we have some suggestions about what those next steps might look like. We want to invite everyone from the project interested in this topic to come to a video call meeting on Big Blue Button on the 26th of October, 3PM UTC, we've added it to the calendar here: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/62/ This is a big and exciting topic and we hope we'll be able to talk with everyone about our next steps. From Martin, Jonathan, Rene

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Developer meeting 20th Sep 2024
by Martin Owens 20 Sep '24

20 Sep '24

Dear inkscape developers, Our meeting this week is as follows. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Marc, René, Jonathan Next date: September 28th Martin wanted to try populating a "Roadmap" which documents in the meeting what the developer team as a whole is doing. This is an effort that KDE uses to encourage contributors and gives them a way to know what's important to the whole project, even if people can work on anything they like to. The way this would work is to have a graphic in the meeting with he roadmap and some space to draw. Jonathan thinks this kind of thing can go on our website too, with the idea that we can frame it as a direction of travel for the whole project and what we'd like to be able to do in the future. Release for 1.4 release candidate. Marc, Martin and Rene talked about the issues still outstanding and what kind of risk we would be taking. Everyone present was happy enough with the quality of the beta3 to continue with the rc schedule: Wednesday September 25th for the RC, this is the last day for any extensions patches. October 7th is the last day for translations, and October 9th is the scheduled date for release. Rene and Marc talked about a window packaging bug which adds windows CRLF end lines to all text files in the repository, this should be fixed so the release no longer shows up as a custom version. Martin wanted to embody the user's needs by saying that having a custom string in the version shouldn't block or delay the release. Marc has a patch for 1.4.x which solves the problem with gitattributes, although this doesn't cover all future cases so René we continue researching the problem. Marc has made a new process for submitting translations and it's currently in testing. And this is how it works: For each Release, we create a single merge request in gitlab targeting that branch. For example 1.4.x. This merge request is the URL we send to translators, who can then submit their translations to the merge request by creating a new comment with the po file attached. Marc has made a system which consumes the comments, adds them as a new commit to the merge request with a credit to the author and then submits a reply comment with the total statistics so users can see if they have submitted correctly. When ready, the translations will be merged into the branch. This can be done multiple times, so we can progressively add translations for betas and release candidates as we move alone the process. The 1.4.x and master branches will be tested and the translation team will be brought in to make sure everything is set up and working correctly and the new system works as a contributor experience. Marc will ask Maren to compile a message for the translations team at the weekend when this live test will be ready to deploy. Jonathan Sent an email to the SFC on the hiring team for the Adobe Illustrator file format and is waiting to hear back. Marc and Jonathan talk about Hactoberfest, it's a way to get first time contributors into open source development; if they contribute a certain number of commits then they get a t-shirt. Except this year, there's no more t-shirts. They have decent ways of dealing with spam so we can add the tag. Marc already added the tag and we part of the program now. spam and accepted tags allow us to tag things positively and negatively. All contributions are welcome, not just code. Because they've ran out of t-shirts we should fund our own. We need to order some t-shits so that we can have them for this event, but also for other things. Martin will make some generic t-shirts and ask for reimbursement if the project decides to fund them, he says that he can use them for his own supporters and projects if not so there's no risk either way. Martin talked about the color stuff and including capypdf into inkscape directly with the C++, Marc recommended including the library as a submodule and gave instructions for how to do this using mason. The gtkmm4 build is an instructive example. Martin explored the developer survey results so far; 21 people responded, the survey will be kept open another week for any stranglers to add their thoughts to it. We'll document the final results after that. Thanks to everyone who came to today's meeting.

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VOTE: AI Import Contracting project, take 2
by Jonathan Neuhauser 09 Sep '24

09 Sep '24

Dear all, ===== Background ===== The developer team ist requesting a budget of $10,000 to continue the AI import project. For details, see the attached proposal. ===== Ballot ===== A: Accept the attached proposal by allocating USD 10,000 for the compensation of the contractor and reimbursement of the license. B: Do not continue the AI project. C: Other ___ Thanks in advance, Jonathan

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Developer Meeting, Sept 4th 2024
by Martin Owens 04 Sep '24

04 Sep '24

Hey everyone, Time for our regular developer meeting notes. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Eledil, Jonathan, Marc, Mikekov, Tav, Ishaan, René Next Meeting: September 12th, (but there is also a PLC meeting on Friday) Beta3 is not perfect because it produces a custom string in the version string which needs to be cleaned up. Marc's certificate expired and needs to renew it. We don't have an official certificate, there is a way around that if we used Azure as a CI builder. We are releasing beta3 today, we had it on draft by accident and have now got it out the door for windows testing specifically. There is an outstanding vote, for hiring a contractor to finish the ai extension. Please make sure you get your votes in for today. Jonathan and Martin talked about the color extensions refactoring branch that is ready for review. Martin will proceed to work on the pdf out extension to add all that color support that now exists. They talk a bit about extensions progress bars and how to get pdf and other things. Jonathan is worried about the speed with a large text file. And how to treat text. Mikekov, has continued work on the object dialog and working on styles. There are a bunch of issues to do with signals and propagation and Martin suggests using signal keys to identify where an update modifier signal has come from. We will discuss this issue further in the chat room. Tav has been working on an Importance Critical bug; when you right click on a spin button it would pop up a menu, that was not the case in 1.4. The menus were mostly used for when the toolbar got too small and there was a menu for each thing that fell of the bar. During the refactoring this feature got removed as not being important. He has a merge request to put them back. An empty call will generate a few useful values even if it's empty. Martin will review. Elendil, if you have an svg file with a css file. The CSS dialog is currently parsing the CSS itself manually and could do with refactoring. The patch code with a comment explaining it should be ok for now as it retains more functionality than retaining the comments would. René is continuing his work on the cross-compiling and Martin's MR to improve that capability. And will help with the version thing. Ishaan will be giving a workshop on Inkscape at a FOSS conference, Bangalore, India. Mikekov; some of our tools are very special. The sp-desktop-style setting and getting is quite broken right now. There's a lot of issues with how these styles are processed before dialogs get access to them. Tav and Martin talk about text object selection with tspans. Ishaan asked about tablet code in master, it had to be removed and now had to be reimplemented. We may need to just review it and make sure we are using the new APIs as intended and that those features are available to windows and macOS users. See you all next time. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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