On Mar 13, 2011, at 2:52 PM, Martin Owens wrote:
Hopefully Inkscape will be signing up for the new Ubuntu Software Center donations work. It's basically going to be very rough and ready for a few cycles, but the hope is that it paves the way for programs delivered through Ubuntu to be paid for, and I'd rather have Free Software paid for than having all the money from our users going to proprietary software.
Given their recent stumbles with Banshee and a few other items., I'm currently extremely wary of Canonical and their money push. We *especially* would need to see something firm on their terms, etc.
I'm not saying it's a bad situation, etc., but there is a definite track record developing where upstream projects either get a lesser deal, or have things arbitrarily imposed. It might be nice if things work out well, but I'd put my money on them definitely needing a few cycles to get things reasonable for upstreams. Canonical does some good work in other ways, so don't get me wrong about that. My guess would be that they're focusing first on getting as stable as a company as they can, and then later will be free to look a bit more at upstream projects.
But I think the bottom line here is that even if Canonical did a good job promoting donations and passing them on upstream, the numbers of contributors and amounts coming in have a good chance of taking a while to become significant.