On 8/22/10, Dave Crossland wrote:
This mailing list can be used to find freelance developers, and www.kickstarter.com can be used to find people to pool money with.
It looks like we already have some sort of relationship with http://linuxfund.org
Or is that idea completely against the spirit of open source?
No, free software is about freedom, not price; and there are many businesses that are built around the GPL.
There is one tricky thing here, however. Once you have people working for money, it's important to maintain existing community of volunteers who might feel less motivated to work for free when there are people who want to works on things for money. Not many projects have such an experience, and not all projects that have it can call it positive.
Another thing is how you keep money flowing in. GIMP project seems to have this covered, but I simply have no idea if the income it has allows someone work full-time on the project, unless we are talking about third world rates. And note that Inkscape is less popular than GIMP which theoretically means less income.
So far for Inkscape project the only paid projects I know of are GSoC projects and Tav's work on the Text tool. GSoC projects are only partly successful, though we got some dedicated programmers from them like Johan, Maximilian or Krzysztof. Tav's project was very successful, albeit he was second programmer to work on it.
Also, the project's PayPal account is still locked (to the best of my knowledge), and nobody ever replied to the mail in this list that asked about http://inkscape.org/donate.php. To me it means that there is no person in the team who is in charge for financial side of things.
Once again, this is not to say that we don't need to grow into a commercially successful (or at least self-supporting) project. But first things first: we urgently need to get organized again.
Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org