[Inkscape-board] Re: VOTE: Release Video Budget

On Sun, Jan 2, 2022 at 9:21 PM Martin Owens <doctormo(a)geek-2.com&gt; wrote: Why would we not take contributions if everything is kosher? Our bar to contribute is pretty low, so if they have commit access, who is going to interfere? Their outside arrangements with 3rd parties aren't really the project's business if everything is above board. Also, why not mention volunteers? Why were they left out? For anyone less familiar with the project that might read this and the phrasing that could be misinterpreted, we don't have "fully employed members of this project" in relation to the project, apparently it's a dig at people with outside full time jobs that volunteer their time to the project. Also what's with the plurality of members in that group? Care to share some names? It seems pretty evident that Ted would likely be one of them (and he clearly thought so too), so being more explicit would be helpful to understand what you're saying and about who. I'd say that your approach here and vagueness was pretty disrespectful in itself. I won't disagree that the project needs some paid work. It probably needs quite a bit no doubt depending on a person's use case and needs. I'd argue that if people are depending on Inkscape for their jobs, it's probably meeting their needs relatively well already (undoubtedly not perfectly, but probably sufficiently). I'm not saying it can't be made better for them, but you start asking those users and I'm pretty sure that the wide variety of needs out there make it incredibly difficult to prioritize whose needs we should be tackling first. As for people donating their money, most donations over the years (when I've seen a note/memo) are generally communicating thanks or appreciation, not asking for us to add or improve feature X. Why would you assume such a thing? This is kind of sounding familiar to prosperity gospel preacher logic (it makes it seem like your motivations seem less about the project and the community needs and more about your wants/desires). All of that aside, this was a weird thread to have a discussion about this topic. Given your framing, how does a release video improve the actual tool itself for our users? Whose needs does it address? What are the performance gains, bugs fixed, or tangible user-facing improvements to the tool? This vote was about funding for a video, to which nobody actually voted against it. Since this was not something which improves the software/tool itself and the post-vote discussion seems a bit emotionally charged for what the vote was as well as the results. If the vote had been for software improvements that are out of scope for volunteer time/complexity and funding for that, why are you assuming how people would vote in THAT situation anyway when there weren't any outright "No" (number 2) votes here? Cheers, Josh