On Fri, May 01, 2015 at 07:06:03PM -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
But the Free Software activist side of me thinks it's a worthwhile investment if we can introduce a way to educate users about their platforms and why a Free Software platform would be better for future buying decisions.
Well said Martin, and I totally agree. This is something I've wanted to pick your brain on, if you're willing to share thoughts on the subject?
One of the things that burnt me out on doing release management for Inkscape years back was the realization we were accumulating tons of users on non-free platforms, and the better we were executing on those platforms the less reason we were giving for them to switch. IOW it felt like our release process and development momentum was getting bogged down fixing Windows bugs to improve Inkscape on Windows, making it easier for Windows users to have the benefits of being on Linux without having to be on Linux.
This time around, one of the main reasons I'm gung-ho on the funded development stuff is to establish a paid way to provide Windows support and tap the Windows userbase to fund the work, so it is less impact on developers that don't care about Windows, and doesn't hold up the release process so much.
I'm also personally less driven to see people switch to Linux specifically, after all the in-fighting, open source politics, and monetization of communities that's happened over the past several years. But I do still believe strongly in the overall ideals of Free Software and encouraging community, collaboration, deliberation, and sharing around collective works in common.
Jon had made a good suggestion of writing up some of the defining principles of Inkscape, such as the idea that we don't draw a line of distinction between user and developer, but consider it a sliding scale and try to invite all users to contribute even in small ways.
There's probably a handful or two of other ideas along those lines that define our development community, which would be valuable to disseminate more broadly. Do you have more ideas on how we could do this?
Bryce