- Inkscape Board of Directors

Vote: Bugfix Accelerator 2025
by Martin Owens 07 Feb '25

07 Feb '25

Dear Project Leadershiop, After the review period is now complete, I submit for vote the final text attached with the following details short description for the vote: I request a budget of $25,500 for 2 x 140 hours of engineering work targeted at bug fixing in the 1.4.x branch and 60 hours of administration targeting the issues, priorities, testing and merge requests of the 1.4.x branch. The recruitment team will be made up of Jonathan Neuhauser and one other Inkscape Member to be recruited. They will send out a call for interested and available workers to apply for one of the three positions. Reports and meetings as described in the attached document. Your vote is required; because the recruitment team will be making the decision on who to employ, you may still vote if you plan to apply yourself: a. Approve the budget for BFA 2025 b. Disapprove c. Something else Thanks everyone. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Inkscape Developer Meeting, 26th Jan 2025
by Martin Owens 26 Jan '25

26 Jan '25

Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Marc, Ishann, ltlnx, Tav Next Event: Feb 3, 2025, 3:00 PM UTC / https://inkscape.org/cals/event/64/ We talked about the LGM meeting and what time it was going to be held. Martin talked about various fixes in the past week as well as continuing work on the PDF exporter. There has been significant friction with upstream with font support and regressions for ligature support which is slowing things down. Martin also worked on color-font support in object-to-path after talking with Tav. The work is incomplete as the glyphs are not positioned correctly. Ishaan has been adding tests for the marker refactoring branch he's working on. Adding tests for paths with markers and bounding boxes and will next work on stroke to path tests. He asked about how to test markers in the stroke to path and we ended up advising Ishann to general small sp-item based pngs to test against before and after running the function. There was also a question about the size of markers in the object to marker and there were two possible problems. Tav suggested that it might be the stroke width itself and using UserUnits preference. Martin suggested that the viewBox might not be set and it is inheriting it from the document. ltlnx has been trying to fix the on canvas support for non-latin language. Looking into the font config situation and if it can be used. At one point the fallbacks did work in Linux but they all don't work now. Tav submitted a merge request for color fonts, it's VERY draft. All OpenType color font types will be supported. Martin talked with Tav about the object to path support and delaying it until Tav's work is complete. Thanks for coming everyone! Martin,

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Fwd: [Hosting] Help Recognize and Acknowledge Glue Work in FOSS Projects
by Maren Hachmann 24 Jan '25

24 Jan '25

FYI: -------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht -------- Betreff: [Hosting] Help Recognize and Acknowledge Glue Work in FOSS Projects Datum: Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:06:07 -0800 Von: Lance Albertson <lance(a)osuosl.org> An: hosting(a)osuosl.org Hosted projects, I am reaching out to share an important initiative led by Professor Anita Sarma [1] from Oregon State University. The project aims to recognize and acknowledge "glue work" in Free and Open Source Software projects. Glue work includes essential tasks such as mentoring, maintenance code, bug fixing, and documentation, which are critical to the health of FOSS projects but often go unrecognized. Professor Sarma has a distinguished history of contributions to the FOSS community. Her work includes projects like Palantír, which raises awareness among configuration management workspaces [2], and Tesseract, an interactive visual exploration tool for socio-technical relationships in software development [2]. She has also focused on making FOSS more inclusive by identifying errors in user interaction design [3]. To better understand where glue work can be traced and how it can be appropriately acknowledged, a survey has been designed. Your participation in this survey would be incredibly valuable. It takes just */5 minutes/* to complete and will help spotlight the full spectrum of contributions that keep our FOSS projects thriving. Please take a moment to fill out the survey and share your insights: https://oregonstate.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_72LK7QHqqCwoqW2 <https://oregonstate.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_72LK7QHqqCwoqW2> Thank you for your time and contribution to this important effort. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns! Thanks! [1] https://engineering.oregonstate.edu/people/anita-sarma <https://engineering.oregonstate.edu/people/anita-sarma> [2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=shMjCasAAAAJ&hl=en <https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=shMjCasAAAAJ&hl=en> [3] https://blog.communitydata.science/fossy-wrap-up-anita-sarmas-lightning-tal… <https://blog.communitydata.science/fossy-wrap-up-anita-sarmas-lightning-tal…> -- Lance Albertson Director Oregon State University | Open Source Lab

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Review: Bugfix Accelerator 2025 (v3)
by Martin Owens 19 Jan '25

19 Jan '25

Dear PLC, As discussed in today's developer meeting, we want to put together a bugfix program for the 1.4.x releases to increase it's robustness. I've taken the previous successful programs run by Jonathan and am submitting the text of the proposal here. I've modified a few parts of it to make sense for the point release schedule and upped the budget to include hours for an issues administrator who will help organise and keep things prioritised. I'm putting this up for review first and in a couple of week I intend to put it up for a vote with your modifications. Because I intend to apply myself, I've made it clear how the hiring committee is put together and changed how unused funds are allocated to make sure there's no conflict of interest from me as the organiser. Best Regards, Martin Owens On behalf of the Developer Team

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Developer Meeting Notes: Jan 10th 2025
by Martin Owens 10 Jan '25

10 Jan '25

Dear Dev Team. Big thanks to everyone at this week's dev meeting: Cal: https://inkscape.org/cals/1/ Attendees: Marc, Mikekov, Rene, Tav, KrIr17, Martin, Ishaan, Jonathan Next Meeting: Early meeting, Jan 18th, Saturday Rene: Plans to move the MacOS pipeline stuff to the Infrastructure group; Also has been in touch with MacStadium, and setting up CIs for Gnome projects Garbled font issue ("tofu") has been identified and fixed in pango. We can finally get rid of it with a dependency update. Yay! KrIr17: Worked on fixing shortcuts in floating dialog windows Ishaan: Working on adding tests based on Rafael's proposal Marc hasn't worked on much and has been on holiday but finding it a little difficult to attend the new meeting times. Jonathan; Hackfest dates: - Hotel is booked from Sunday (2.2.)- Thursday (6.2.) morning for all participants that haven't told me otherwise (checkout 9:30 am). For those who have already booked flights, they can stay until Friday morning. - Conference room is reserved Monday (3.2.) - Wednesday (5.2.) evening. Projector available. - Hotel address is Haus der Jugend e.V., Deutschherrnufer 12, 60594 Frankfurt am Main - If you also want to attend FOSDEM, we can take a train to Frankfurt together: I’ll take the train at 16:25 from Brussels to Frankfurt, which arrives at Frankfurt/Main main station (2km from the youth hostel) at 19:31. - I haven't figured out the hotel reimbursement procedure with the SFC yet, working on that. Martin worked on a bunch of fixes, and some tentative features. Asked about doing 1.4.1. Jonathan says he would be in support of running a bugfix contract for 1.4.x if the testing team thinks it's necessary. Elendil reported on where we are on the project and some concerns about forward porting and back porting. Jonathan: Manpreet has been working on the AI import extensions, adding support for shapes and text. It's looking solid. Linearity Curve (ex-Vectornator) has locked out users by making the software paid. Someone has been working on a Curve->Svg importer, and wants to integrate it with Inkscape. Plus there has been a a lot of progress on Affinity importer, which would be nice to have in 1.4.1 Also worked on an extension showcasing automatic packaging and translation of extensions. Mikekov worked on the update modified signals. He tried a bunch of different possible techniques. Ishaan asked about markers and the transform tag on marker tags. Krlr17 asked about text attributes using pre and pre-wrap and older versions of the files. See you all next time!

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Developer Meeting: 2nd Jan 2025
by Martin Owens 02 Jan '25

02 Jan '25

Happy New year Inkscape, This is the first Developer meeting of 2025 and we spent almost two hours going through lots of different topics: Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Attending: Martin, Elendil, Ishaan, ScislaC, Vaibhav, Tav Next: Jan 10th 2025, later meeting time. Organise an event in India? There's enough people in that part of the world to have people meet and pay for travel and hosting. There are FOSS events and Ishaan tried to organise an event but asking in Vectors but no one was interested. Martin suggested making community with other Asian contributors directly. India is a big country alone and travel can be longer than expected. Three hour flight to Bangalor from Dehli. Martin advises to get in touch with the plc when plans are known and we'd put together a funding. Elendil shared the contributors map from 2023 from where everyone was as an example for how spread out the contributor community is. Vaibhav and Martin talked about using the caps, scroll lock key. We talked about the comments and how we'd run a user experience study on the ideas and using them as modifiers in the code. ScislaC asked about AppImages and how we can best test and narrow down when an issue first happened. Martin explained his personal process of using release AppImages for older issues and pipeline results for newer ones. Vaibhav asked about releasing AppImages in the GitLab release. Elindil reports that AppImages from three years ago have been deleted, but anything newer are available. Martin knows that space on GitLab can sometimes be a problem and pipeline results are deleted. There are still issues with getting and retaining windows developers. The buld time is very very slow on windows and this is causing problems. We told each other stories of how we were introduced to Free Software, and the change in the community over those years and what technologies brought people into the ecosystem and community. Vaibhav has been working on text on path and it involves a lot of maths which can be quite complicated. We talked about the dificulty of fixing some of the problems in boolops, color and other parts of inkscape that need more of a computer science background. There are a bunch of new nodes which allow the text to path to be controlled better. Vaibhav worked on a few thigns at the same time, worked on pending reviews in GSoC. We're reaching the end for the node editing improvements but the pen editing functionality wil take more time to complete. We looked at the design and some of the ways the MR needs to be improved. Elendil has been working on shortcut handling. There is a GLOBAL vs. LOCAL setting which we have set to GLOBAL despite this not being the default there is no commit message or comments which explain why we have this setup. Ishaan has continued their work on marker transforms. Martin says he can help with the cairo use of the API with marker z-order data. There some other regressions in markers which are separate but could do with being tested. We went through the way to write unit tests. ScislaC brought to our attention an old issue with the modification keys where it used to be possible to change the scale of objects by hovering over one of the resize controls. Martin has said he will fix the issue if reported. See you all next time! Martin,

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PLC Jan Status Meeting
by Ted Gould 01 Jan '25

01 Jan '25

Howdy folks, Happy New Year! I'll be in the mountains on Friday so I won't be able to run the status meeting on Friday. Is someone available to take over running the meeting? Thanks, Ted

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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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