On Sun, 2011-03-13 at 22:29 +0300, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
Note that Blender is very different from Inkscape in terms of how much money you as a user make on a project involving Inkscape and a project involving Blender.
Money is interesting, so is opportunity.
I don't think putting a donate button on the website will do much as it doesn't offer much of an opportunity, nor does it set an expectation of _every_ user to invest in the project's future.
The Inkscape board can decide if raising that expectation is counter to the project's culture or stated aim.
If user's pay you to do something, then you must do that thing. If the job required a whole bunch of background work, then you do that too and make sure to price it in. If the user's can't meet the price then the work can't be done.
If programmer can't properly price their work, then that's an issue of understanding what they have to do. Having a special generic fund for special people who do research and write proposals and little else, works in other organisational fields.
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.
Which is just what we encourage at the moment.
Regards, Martin Owens