Discussions during the Hackfest ===============================
Fund raising and what the money is used for:
We had both Krita and Gimp developers present.
Krita view:
Receives $6000 per month from both the Windows and Steam store. They charge $9.99.
Windows does not allow links to "free" copies. Steam can handle all platforms but is difficult to set up. MacStore might have GPL issues, easier with GPL 2.
Krita pays four full-time developers.
Gimp view:
Gimp receives lots of donations ($100,000 from one source).
Gimp does not pay developers but spends its funds on buying equipment for developers and getting them together.
There was general agreement that we should start charging on the Windows store. We though $19.99 was a good price. We do want to offer a free download option but that is difficult with Windows store policy. One way of working around this is to make a download link prominent on our home page (it already is) and linking to that. A second way is to have two Window store entries, one for payed and one free. We can include a link to a free version of Inkscape on the Steam store. Marc is going to look at how hard it is to put Inkscape on that store.
There was general agreement that hiring a full time person to handle infrastructure/fund raising/etc. is a good idea.
We also discussed the "nofollow" keyword in the links to our sponsors and how it is effecting the sponsorship renewals. Recognizing that there are two types of sponsors: those that are truly interested in promoting Inkscape and those that are using the links to raise their profile in search engines. We thought that charging extra for removing the "nofollow" keyword might be worth doing.
Inkscape dependencies:
This is only an issue for the Linux builds. We agreed that we should support:
* Debian Stable (9) * Ubuntu Last LTS (18.04) * Last CentOS/Redhat (as best effort) * Fedora Last 2
And we shouldn't break for point releases.
MacOSX:
A lot of work was done on the 1.0 MaxOSX build during the hackfest.
It was noted that MacOS 10.15 will no longer support 32bit builds. This will cause problems for those using the 0.92 builds. 1.0 will likely not be ready by the time 10.15 is out. One solution is to point people to the "Curated MacOSX" builds, although this is not an "Official" Inkscape build.
1.0 Release:
Marc came up with a new schedule for the 1.0 release that was agreed to by those present. Key items to solve before beta:
* Merge Jabier's improvements to the XML dialog (attributes/styling/selectors). * Fix missing icons on startup.
Alpha 2 at end of LGM. (DONE)
Extensions:
There was a general annoyance with breaking API and with losing file import via Uniconvertor. Uniconvertor is no longer being packaged separately so this is not just an Inkscape problem.
Hackfest dinner:
We shared a space with Gimp and Krita. Bill came to 283 Euros ($321).