Dear PLC,
this is a vote to extend Daniel Boles' contract for another two months (320 hours) and allocate additional budget at the request of the development team.
Background:
- Daniel was originally hired for the GTK4 migration. This is making good progress: as of now, the development team estimates that a first version of Inkscape that builds with GTK4 will be available around the time his current contract ends. - By all accounts, the progress has been very steady, also including general code cleanups which however did not distract him from his main task. We were impressed by his knowledge, speed, and contribution quality. By now, Daniel has 174 MRs merged. - However, there are will be no more hours to spend for debugging, fixing regressions, and upstream bugs. Daniel now has in-depth knowledge of Inkscape's codebase as well as his GTK4 expertise. He would be a very valuable asset going forward, so we feel it would be great to have him available for some additional time. - He has expressed interest to take on a permanent position somewhere and in that case would finish the contract part-time. This might be an even better deal for us, as he can take on a "consultant / technical support" role, on an as-needed basis, e.g. fixing difficult bugs and helping other contributors to move their work to GTK4. This is possible under the terms of his (current) contract: it allows to submit invoices over the course of a year, for a total of 320 hours. The same model would apply to the extension of his contract. - If he - which we currently don't expect - runs out of work related to GTK4, there's enough other technical debt that he can work on.
Ballot:
a) Extend Daniel Boles' contract for another two months (320 hours) under the same conditions as his previous contracts; the work items will be (ordered by priority, as time permits) - finishing the GTK4 migration, - fix regressions in the GTK4 build of Inkscape, including upstream work, - assist other contributors in updating their work for GTK4 if requested, - work on other technical debt in the Inkscape codebase and allocate $16,000 for his compensation.
b) Don't extend Daniel Boles' contract.
c) Other: ______
Best regards, Jonathan