Hey Alexandre,
It smells fishy, but it could also be an opportunity which just
appears "off". To even consider it we would need to know who the
companies are and to get information about them (Who are they? Where
are they based? How long have they been around? What work history do
they have? etc). Have they taken into account that Inkscape is
cross-platform and it would need to work on all platforms? Not to
mention that the developers will need to actually sign up for the
developer-list, introduce themselves, discuss their plans, etc. And if
they don't want commit access (to avoid 2 patches for each dev
involved), we need for them to work in a public branch so that
progress and revision history can be tracked. Have the developers even
looked at our codebase? Do they have experience with other open source
projects? If so, which one(s)? Honestly, this is just tip of the
iceberg stuff.
I think there's a lot of risk of us putting up news and we need to
protect the project and our users. They are really going to need to
impress me before I would be willing to consider backing it. For now
though, until we get a ton of info (and my ability to verify it) as
well as communication going, they won't get my support.
Cheers,
Josh
On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 5:47 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine
<alexandre.prokoudine@...23...> wrote:
Hello board,
A day ago I was contacted by Łukasz Remiś who started this campaign:
http://www.indiegogo.com/Advanced-PDF-export-plugin-for-Inkscape
to raise funds for development of advanced PDF exporting featuring
CMYK color separation and more.
I immediately told him. CCing Jon Cruz and Josh, that $800 is not
going to make it and that before he decides on amount of money needed
for that, he has to decide, how exactly he does it, and this is best
discussed with the team.
The reply came few hours ago and it basically boils down to the
following: he claims to have done a finanical research and found two
companies willing to do that work for $800. So he wants me to post
news on
inkscape.org about the kickstarter.
In all hoinesty. I think this is bullshit. This is clearly not a $800
goal, and those companies don't have a clue. And since I don't see the
guy contacting *anyone* in the team, at least publicly, I'm inclined
to ignore the request until he contacts the team and they come to
agreement about implementation, scope of the project and real price.
The problem here is that he thinks he's right, so he might try
reaching to a wider audience, and then it's going to be a disaster. He
already posted that on inkscapeforum, and it's a blessing this hasn't
ended up on omgubuntu yet.
So, this is the current state of affairs. Whether any decisions should
be taken, is entirely up to you. Personally, I'm not doing anything
until I see an agreement between kickstarter orgs, team and whoever
agrees to work on it.
Alexandre