On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 07:55:09PM -0300, Gez wrote:
El dom, 10-05-2015 a las 15:10 -0700, Bryce Harrington escribió:
I've been of similar mind to this. Value is gained by the project not from use but from contributions.
That said, now that we have a donation system set up, it is likely that expanding the userbase will result in cash flow. We just have to ensure there's a reliable way to convert $$ to development.
I'm not against expanding the user base and funding development either. As far as I could see, one of the best ways to turn money into code that makes a difference is funding hackfest / hackatons / coding sprints. Funding specific featurs is always more problematic for a number of reasons:
- Not everyone shares the same opinion about the feature about to be
implemented, specially if it comes from a request from users.
- It creates some tension, because some people gets paid and the rest
doesn't.
On the other hand, there are bugs that are cans of worms that nobody wants to open, and in that case nobody will complain if money is used to pay for fixing that kind of stuff, as nobody wants to do it.
I would like to know how does it work for inkscape to do something along the lines of what Ardour does: Charging for the binaries. The GPL license doesn't prohibit that and the source code would be available to anyone willing to build the program themselves, but he money could be used for paying packagers, developers and code reviewers.
It's been discussed. Such as in the various app stores, provide Inkscape at some nominal (or exemplary?) fee.
It would be interesting to let users choose how their payment is used in the project (like www.humblebundle.com lets you choose where the money goes and you can select which percentage goes to the developers, to the site and to charity). Something similar would allow people to choose if they want their money to be used for supporting inkscape for their chosen platform, for new features, bugfixing, hackfests, for using at Inkscape board's discresion, etc.
That's one of the things we're hoping for with the funded development process. People with ideas like yours for charging for binaries, can put them into effect and decide what they want the money to fund. So for instance, if you set up Inkscape binaries in the Apple App Store, as the organizer of that "fundraiser" you could choose to have the income be targeted to funding Inkscape MacFests, where priority is given to attendees on Macs, and focus of the hacking is on improving Inkscape for use on Mac. Or whatever.
But just like with everything else, it all depends on people putting in the time and effort to set these things up.
Bryce