Dear PLC & Devel,
This is an interesting bit of news. Godot, which is a member of the Software freedom Conservancy, and one of their largest other projects have had their leadership set up a for profit company called w4 games. This is ostensibly to develop Godot further.
"Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need." - https://w4games.com/
This is interesting to us here I believe. One of the conflicts I have personally with the SFC is how constraining and limited the SFC are for many of the things that would allow Inkscape to grow, invite commercial partners, hire developers, pay mentors, fund marketing research and design. Material things that we currently patch together with very kind support for key volunteers, but should be more properly resourced.
Has anyone here had thoughts about developing a commercial company to develop Inkscape?
I'm going to be reaching out to the new Godot business as well as a few of their contacts to see what their thoughts are and see what I can learn and if we can copy them.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
Sounds fine to me. Obviously we want to make sure that Inkscape's funding goes for all the things we've been discussing. Also be interested to see how this would change how Inkscape gets money. I guess it just wouldn't be called "donation" anymore. I'd like to make sure that Inkscape's compiled binaries are still available for free. We should do our fundraising other ways. If you can collect that info from Godot, I'd be very interested to know how they are going to go about doing this.
Thanks for looking into it, Martin! -C
On Wed, Aug 10, 2022 at 8:27 PM Martin Owens doctormo@gmail.com wrote:
Dear PLC & Devel,
This is an interesting bit of news. Godot, which is a member of the Software freedom Conservancy, and one of their largest other projects have had their leadership set up a for profit company called w4 games. This is ostensibly to develop Godot further.
"Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need." - https://w4games.com/
This is interesting to us here I believe. One of the conflicts I have personally with the SFC is how constraining and limited the SFC are for many of the things that would allow Inkscape to grow, invite commercial partners, hire developers, pay mentors, fund marketing research and design. Material things that we currently patch together with very kind support for key volunteers, but should be more properly resourced.
Has anyone here had thoughts about developing a commercial company to develop Inkscape?
I'm going to be reaching out to the new Godot business as well as a few of their contacts to see what their thoughts are and see what I can learn and if we can copy them.
Best Regards, Martin Owens _______________________________________________ Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org
I think you misunderstand Chris.
They've not taken Godot private, they've done something more interesting. Letting it continue the way that it is, but choosing to develop an enterprise with different branding and other aspects.
To put this into Inkscape's perspective. Nothing changes for Inkscape™, inkscape's money would remain Inkscape's, to sit around doing nothing year after year. But we, as developers, designers and other contributors could choose to spend our time developing a company which would pay us to contribute to Inkcape. This would be a sort of partnership. But this is highly speculative and I don't have a lot of details from what W4 have done regards to their relationship with their FOSS project.
Martin,
On Wed, 10 Aug 2022 at 15:44, C R cajhne@gmail.com wrote:
Sounds fine to me. Obviously we want to make sure that Inkscape's funding goes for all the things we've been discussing. Also be interested to see how this would change how Inkscape gets money. I guess it just wouldn't be called "donation" anymore. I'd like to make sure that Inkscape's compiled binaries are still available for free. We should do our fundraising other ways. If you can collect that info from Godot, I'd be very interested to know how they are going to go about doing this.
Thanks for looking into it, Martin! -C
On Wed, Aug 10, 2022 at 8:27 PM Martin Owens doctormo@gmail.com wrote:
Dear PLC & Devel,
This is an interesting bit of news. Godot, which is a member of the Software freedom Conservancy, and one of their largest other projects have had their leadership set up a for profit company called w4 games. This is ostensibly to develop Godot further.
"Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need." - https://w4games.com/
This is interesting to us here I believe. One of the conflicts I have personally with the SFC is how constraining and limited the SFC are for many of the things that would allow Inkscape to grow, invite commercial partners, hire developers, pay mentors, fund marketing research and design. Material things that we currently patch together with very kind support for key volunteers, but should be more properly resourced.
Has anyone here had thoughts about developing a commercial company to develop Inkscape?
I'm going to be reaching out to the new Godot business as well as a few of their contacts to see what their thoughts are and see what I can learn and if we can copy them.
Best Regards, Martin Owens _______________________________________________ Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org
On Aug 10 2022, at 2:27 pm, Martin Owens doctormo@gmail.com wrote:
This is an interesting bit of news. Godot, which is a member of the Software freedom Conservancy, and one of their largest other projects have had their leadership set up a for profit company called w4 games. This is ostensibly to develop Godot further.
That's great for them. I think that there are opportunities for Inkscape that are similar, but different. They're selling to smaller development studios who already understand the value of paying for development and support. I don't think there is a similar customer group for Inkscape. (though I haven't done an analysis proving either way) Personally I think the biggest opportunity for Inkscape there would be to provide "certified" builds for the educational market along with support services. We've gotten many requests for those, and it's hard for us as an open source project to provide the appropriate guarantees that they require. Also, many school systems have started requiring support for all software approved for their computers (a good requirement, but again hard for us to handle as a volunteer project). All in all, I think there is definitely room for commercial entities to exist along side and collaborate with the volunteer project. Would love to see more of them exist. Ted
On Wed, 10 Aug 2022 at 16:16, Ted Gould ted@gould.cx wrote:
Personally I think the biggest opportunity for Inkscape there would be to provide "certified" builds for the educational market along with support services. We've gotten many requests for those, and it's hard for us as an open source project to provide the appropriate guarantees that they require. Also, many school systems have started requiring support for all software approved for their computers (a good requirement, but again hard for us to handle as a volunteer project).
I agree with this speculative analysis. I do see some non-education partnerships are possible, but with the caveat that those partnerships have to be built and aren't freely available. Mostly I think improving trust in the productive capacity of Inkscape would encourage more commercial participation. Which I think is basically the service you're talking about here, but perhaps more speculative.
Martin,
Very interesting, this is worth exploring!
Obviously Godot came to the realization that they need to do something and that „this something“ has to happen outside SFC. Will be interesting to learn about their thoughts and struggles that lead to all of this. Hopefully this is something they are able and willing to share!
René
Am 10.08.2022 um 21:27 schrieb Martin Owens doctormo@gmail.com:
Dear PLC & Devel,
This is an interesting bit of news. Godot, which is a member of the Software freedom Conservancy, and one of their largest other projects have had their leadership set up a for profit company called w4 games. This is ostensibly to develop Godot further.
"Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need." - https://w4games.com/
This is interesting to us here I believe. One of the conflicts I have personally with the SFC is how constraining and limited the SFC are for many of the things that would allow Inkscape to grow, invite commercial partners, hire developers, pay mentors, fund marketing research and design. Material things that we currently patch together with very kind support for key volunteers, but should be more properly resourced.
Has anyone here had thoughts about developing a commercial company to develop Inkscape?
I'm going to be reaching out to the new Godot business as well as a few of their contacts to see what their thoughts are and see what I can learn and if we can copy them.
Best Regards, Martin Owens _______________________________________________ Inkscape Devel mailing list -- inkscape-devel@lists.inkscape.org To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-devel-leave@lists.inkscape.org
participants (4)
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C R -
Martin Owens -
René de Hesselle -
Ted Gould