On Sat, 2017-10-21 at 00:53 +0200, Marc Jeanmougin wrote:
I discussed funding models with various people from different projects, so here is what I gathered:
- Both VLC and Blender have a lot of sponsorship from hardware
companies who are interested in these softs keeping running smoothly with their newest hardware on the highest resolution monitors existing. Blender also has support from the steam workshop, a 3d asset store, their store (training, books, wear)…
- VLC has a dual structure with a non-profit along with a small
startup in multimedia consulting, paying a dozen devs (They also say that they have a single ad (adsense) on their download page which alone pays for a dev)
- MuseScore (software for music sheets) has a website to upload/share
them which has a paying subscription model to upload more than some amount
Overall, no "magical" way to amass vast riches, just a thought that if we could support GPU SVG rendering we might be able to ask GPU vendors if they'd be interested in sponsoring us (or conversely if they'd be interested in sponsoring us so that we could try to implement/use GPUs in cairo rendering)
Nvidia approached me a few years ago about adding a GPU backend using their OpenGL 2d rendering extensions to Inkscape. We (Inkscape) talked about it briefly but didn't want to start using proprietary things (Nvidia was trying to get the extensions into the OpenGL standard but none of the other GPU manufacturers were interested). We had also just recently moved to Cairo and adding another rendering backend seemed a bit much. I suggested that they look into an OpenGL backend for Cairo.
The examples they showed of rendering SVG did look great as they could get rid of a lot of rendering artifacts by rendering at a higer DPI then scaling down.
Tav