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