On Wed, 2011-02-02 at 12:39 -0800, Josh Andler wrote:
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.
I'm still against doing paid projects with the foundation's money. I think that introducing having some paid developers and others not is difficult. GSoC is different in that it's Google handling the money and it's also limited to a relatively restricted group of developers (students). I think that the amount of animosity caused by the money is not offset by the amount of work completed.
That being said, yes, we should spend the money. I'd rather spend it on hackfests where the foundation would cover travel and expenses for developers to work on specific projects. So, for instance, do a color separation sprint the week before LGM. Or, perhaps a webpage boot strapping hackfest the few days before SCALE in LA.
--Ted