On Fri, Apr 01, 2005 at 09:05:49PM -0500, Eric Jonas wrote:
What lab are you at at MIT? We need to setup a donation system. Bryce or myself can funnel funds to Inkscape, as we don't have a group account setup currently.
Presently what we encourage instead of cash is contributions in kind (e.g., chip in with tutorials, documentation, code, or whatever strikes your fancy). That's the most directly effective and efficient way to show your appreciation and to help make Inkscape better.
This is hard for a group like ours where we have lots of financial resources but limited time. Most of the people I work with would be excellent inkscape users, but they're not quite at the level of coding, and those of us coding have our hands quite full (must...finish...thesis) Thats why I was suggesting a support or priority bugfix option. To buy "contract software" as an institution requires an enormous amount of headache and paperwork, whereas support agreements and boxed software are purchased daily without a second thought.
Ah, interesting points. I'd imagine a boxed software approach might be feasible. We've discussed bug bounty systems but decided it would be more of a hassle than a help, and I doubt we'd ever set something like that up. Other approaches are doable, though, as long as it seems to be fair on all sides and wouldn't risk building up expectations too highly.
For what it's worth, here is my reasoning for why "contributions in kind" is such a good approach: Consider a bug that takes 10 hours to fix. At $50/hr, that's $500 dollars, well above what a single user would pay for a graphics application. Maybe five users could combine funds to meet that, $100 each. But instead consider if those five users instead each put in just two hours of work helping with some non-technical tasks like writing documentation, or answering questions of other users, or even just creating really cool art to stimulate other developer to want to contribute. Those are all things that the coder would have to do himself otherwise, so it saves him the time that he can put into adding features or fixing other bugs. :-)
That said, I'm sure there'll be more and more people who want to support the project but haven't the time - or worse, that we'll run out of non-technical work to be done! ;-) So I agree we ought to investigate additional ideas.
And, with all of that, I would love to chip in with code help as soon as this blasted thesis is done. I'm writing a lot of gtkmm-code right now, too, so perhaps I might be of some use come this summer. Again, thanks for making such a spectacular piece of software...
Love to have you involved. :-)
Bryce