On Mon, 2011-03-14 at 01:30 +0300, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
The Inkscape board can decide if raising that expectation is counter
to
the project's culture or stated aim.
You lost me there :) Opportunity? Expectations? Huh?
Expectations are critical to getting money from users in order to maintain development. The first one is separating out donations from other payments, as the first carries little expectation on the part of the developer and users are not expected to donate. Low expectations and it's no surprise donations pull in low amounts of money.
Every time Inkscape is distributed directly to users, the inkscape community/board should consider what opportunity there is to ask for either donations or other involvement/payments. When inkscape is downloaded from the debian archive or installed from the Ubuntu Software Center. At the moment users don't even know it's possible to donate.
Let alone that giving back to Inkscape might be considered good manners and be somewhat expected.
If user's pay you to do something, then you must do that thing.
Really? If a user says "Here is my 20 bucks, now you clone AI's user interface", must I still do it? Exactly why? :)
Why indeed would you take that $20? transactions are based not just on the customer's choice to buy, but the tradesman's willingness to sell. If the user isn't giving you enough money, then calmly explain how much you think it would cost, perhaps inviting the user to start a kickstarter or some such to group fund the feature.
I'm afraid you are missing what I previously wrote: the committee is *dead* against paid development. Now, *I* am all in favour of it, but I don't make decisions.
That's something the Inkscape board probably have to resolve for themselves. For my brain it's easy to resolve because I consider all code already written as already paid for, therefor no one who has written anything already is due any money that comes in afterwards. If there is a case for money to be spent on getting a _new_ person to come in and do a project, or perhaps a small Inkscape summer of code project, that sort of thing is easier to digest than full blown employment of select historical Inkscape developers.
Regards, Martin Owens