- Inkscape Board of Directors

Re: [Inkscape-board] re committee
by Aaron Spike 18 Jun '11

18 Jun '11

Ok. So to summarize, the question is, "do we want to sell a short commercially produced tutorial from a link next to the download button on our main page?" I guess this could be broken into two questions 1) do we want to sell this tutorial and 2) do we want to publicize it in such a prominent location? What are the likely issues going to be? - is it hard to make a decision without knowledge of the quality of the tutorial? - how will this affect our volunteer documentation efforts? Are they getting such prime real estate? - standard questions about need for and use of money. - what precedent is this setting, ie how will we respond (possibly unlikely) requests from other publishers or documentation sources? Let's hear some opinions folks. Aaron Spike

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Re: [Inkscape-board] re committee
by Josh Andler 18 Jun '11

18 Jun '11

Hey Alexandre (& board), I really think this is one of those tough issues regarding Packt and the project showing any form of favoritism in the name of financial gain vs something community based (not say that there's anything comparable, but saying that tends to be the preference). If I could get a copy of it (no I don't want to pay) to judge the quality, I could then feel comfortable with voting. As for the board though, I do believe that at some point it was originally supposed to be term based. I think we should revisit this issue as there may be people on the board who are no longer actively involved with the project and are unresponsive. Additionally, there may also be some of our newer & more active contributors who might have different perspectives that could be beneficial. I feel that at least two people should definitely be given the opportunity to be on the board. Those people would be Johan & JazzyNico. According to ohloh.net (not perfect), but Johan is ranked as the #2 committer to the project behind only bulia and Nicolas is ranked #5 (4 commits away from being #4)... and yes, I realize that Nicolas also does translation work and maintenance, but I'm looking at commitment to the project. At some point I'd also want to extend offers to Felipe & Krzysztof as well, but that's for another day. Johan & Nicolas, would you be interested on being on the board? If you look at the archives for the list, we rarely talk about stuff (every 6 months at best, I believe we've had a stretch of well over a year with no discussions), so it's by no means a big commitment time-wise. Alexandre, I understand where you're coming from. Please know that you evangelizing for the project (and oss graphics software in general) is HUGELY appreciated. Please don't leave us. I will admit, I've been at that point in the past too... mainly when there is no code changing activity, lack of responses on the mailing lists, and it seems like no one is interested in just fixing bugs so we can just get a release out. Adib & Nicolas generally step up and relieve that tension though (Gellule is shaping up to be another). Either way, I've literally been just an inch away from the half baked scene (NSFW): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuBRk6tjiUQ(obviously I wouldn't be like that with any fellow contributors, but I've certainly been that frustrated). Cheers, Josh On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 2:43 AM, Alexandre Prokoudine < alexandre.prokoudine@...23...> wrote: > Hi, > > I have to say that I'm extremely disappointed with Inkscape committee. > It's been a month since I'm not able to tell PacktPub *anything* > concrete about their proposal. A PR person is not supposed to keep > people waiting a whole damn month. > > Guys, what do you expect me to tell PacktPub? That decision makers in > the project don't care about the project? That they don't actually > make decisions per se? Do you understand that this is about > reputation? > > I can stretch it a bit once again, but if this nonsense doesn't stop, > I will step down as PR manager. > > Please forward to the rest of the committee. > > Alexandre Prokoudine > http://libregraphicsworld.org >

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Re: [Inkscape-board] re committee
by Aaron Spike 17 Jun '11

17 Jun '11

On 06/16/2011 05:34 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: > Let's just agree that here and now we need a decision, and that > decision should be communicated to PacktPub in a timely manner. I can > wrap up our reply, what ever it would turn out to be, in nice words > and pass it on. I've done it before, I can do it again. But continuous > lack of decision despite of pinging and pinging and pinging committee > members simply makes us look bad. To me this is unacceptable. I agree! But I must not have been one of the aforementioned "pingged". What exactly are we deciding this time? Last I remember Bradley was working directly with Packt to arrange payment and I see their books listed on our site. I thought I had been watching the -board list closely, but I confess that I missed whatever you sent. I apologize if I'm the only one who doesn't know what's going on here. What remains to be done? Thanks again for pushing this forward! Aaron Spike

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Fwd: donate
by Aaron Spike 21 Apr '11

21 Apr '11

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: donate Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2011 20:34:47 +0200 From: Kai Seefeldt <ks@...30...> To: acspike@...23... Hi Aaron, I would like to support the Inkscape Project and I would be interested in getting a Backlink to our "How we work with inkscape" article on your homepage. I would be willing to pay 5.000$ if you set me a permament Link with a small text. Would that be interesting for you? Thanks and best, Kai

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Developer Sprint
by Josh Andler 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

Hey Board, So, given that we have money in the bank and things like devsprints are considered kosher, can I try and organize one for our most inspired/active/interested developers? My thought is plan out a ways so airfare is reasonable, and book a few hotel rooms for 6-8 developers for a few nights if they're interested. I think a primary focus should be on svg features/compliance (just one idea of many). The people I have in mind to be a part (I'm not intentionally leaving people out, just looking at some of the most active & driven current developers), if interested, are Johan, Felipe, JazzyNico, Tav, JonCruz, Felipe, Jasper, & Krzysztof. Obviously we'd need to see if they're interested, but with enough lead time and pre-discussion about what people are interested in tackling... we could have some excellent stuff accomplished. Thoughts? Cheers, Josh

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Fwd: possible paid project
by Josh Andler 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

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

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Re: [Inkscape-board] Fwd: possible paid project
by Josh Andler 03 Feb '11

03 Feb '11

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

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Vote: Inkscape should fund the rest of the Linux Fund project
by Ted Gould 16 Sep '09

16 Sep '09

Please reply with a yea or nay on whether the Inkscape funds of $630 should be given to Linux Fund in order to finance the remaining bits necessary for the text tool project. Ted: nay --Ted

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Linux Fund and sponsoring work on the text tool
by Ted Gould 11 Sep '09

11 Sep '09

Hello Board, So Linux Fund who has volunteered some funds to help sponsor development on our text tool has not received the matching that they would need to pay for the full development cost. They would like to either fund it, or free up the funds by the end of their fiscal year, which is the end of this month. The difference is $630. They would like the foundation to pay the difference. I have very mixed feelings on this. While it seems like a very small amount to pay for a feature that is weak in Inkscape, I'm also concerned about the prescient that it sets as we certainly don't have the money to fund development regularly. Though, there are already "funded" developers working on Inkscape through GSoC even though there are major restrictions on the eligibility by having to be enrolled in school. Lastly, there are some political implications. Linux Fund has volunteered to help us, turning this down probably would mean that they wouldn't make that offer again. I don't believe that to be a major downside, but also something that should be considered. I'm proposing that we do a simple vote on it. How about votes due by Sunday evening? Depending on that I'll either write a nice e-mail to Linux Fund thanking them for their generosity or ask the Software Conservancy to send the money. --Ted

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Re: [Inkscape-board] the LF contract
by Ted Gould 02 Sep '09

02 Sep '09

On Tue, 2009-09-01 at 22:32 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: > Back in February we and Linux Foundation announced sponsoring Milosz > Derezynski to work on the text tool. > > I see that according to http://www.linuxfund.org/projects/inkscape/ > there simply wasn't enough funding. Maybe the Inkscape committee could > discuss this and sponsor the project? Our Text tool really demands > attention. The Linux Fund folks and Bradley from the conservancy discussed that, and they said that it is possible. Personally, I'm just a little concerned about paying developers in general. I realize that this is a small situation -- but I guess I worry about the precedent there. --Ted PS - CC'ing the board list.

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