On Tue, 2010-09-21 at 21:24 -0300, bulia byak wrote:
On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 7:55 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine
This is exactly where I see the problem: presumably the project still has a committee, but it doesn't look like the committee is around. I had my reasons to contact it about a year ago and never heard back from it.
If you want a committee to discuss development matters, we don't have it, and I think that's a good thing. We operate more or less by consensus.
If you want a committee to accept donations and distribute them as travel grants (possibly little else), then we don't have it either, and it's probably not a good thing. But people have a natural reluctancy to take responsibility for other people's money, especially when the amounts are small ("more trouble than it's worth"). Given that we've been able to operate without it, perhaps it's not that critical. Though if someone trusted now comes forward willing to collect donations and manage the resulting fund, I don't think anyone will object.
We do technically have this with an inkscape-board, but it's fairly inactive as we don't have much money or really need for money. We mostly end up distributing some money for LGM travel occasionally. I imagine if we had more money this would end up being more active.
On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 00:23 -0400, Joshua Facemyer wrote:
BTW, what exactly is the status of the SFC membership?
Currently Inkscape has an account with SFLC and that contains all of the money that "the project" has. It's not very much. Most of it comes from the mentoring bonus that Google Summer of Code pays out. It also receives some money from donations, but that hasn't resulted in a lot of money even compared to the mentor money from Google.
So in general, I'd describe both of these as the "Inkscape Foundation" as much as anything is. But, I don't believe that it is, or should be, an organization the developers work for or leads development.
Lastly, I'll say that when Linux Fund came and offered half of the money for a project, the community didn't exactly come up with the other half quickly and fund that project. I think while everyone says "I've got a bit of money" they don't have any agreement on where that should go so there's never a pot big enough to actually implement any of the features people want to pay for.
--Ted