-----Original Message----- From: Alexandre Prokoudine [mailto:alexandre.prokoudine@...400...] Sent: zondag 22 augustus 2010 18:11 To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] funding inkscape developement
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.
For me, free software is a little bit about not getting payed. But, I am still not familiar the free software community. I think what I like better is that money is donated afterwards to somebody, instead of offering it before writing some code. (such that the money is a reward for doing something you had no idea about getting money for it, instead of the money being a motivation)
From: Alexandre Prokoudine [mailto:alexandre.prokoudine@...400...] Sent: zondag 22 augustus 2010 18:11
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.
After my first shot at the PowerStroke LPE, I received an excited mail from Dave Crossland about whether I was interested in working on it full-time for a while being payed. That got me thinking. Here a list of some of the questions I have, for you to have a peek inside the mind of one developer.
- if I get payed for PowerStroke, will that make me only work on Inkscape for money afterwards?
- how much time should one invest in a payed project? I have to work on Inkscape in my spare time, so 10 hours a week would feel pretty much 'full-time'. But, given a lot of prior experience with Inkscape coding, 10 hours can give big output results. (the current powerstroke took about 12 hours, I'm guessing)
- I'd have to not-do other things, coding for Inkscape instead. How much money would motivate me to work on PowerStroke, instead of, for example, practice guitar or go to friends? And how much money is reasonable to ask? (I have not worked on PowerStroke for a couple of weeks now, how come?)
- If I need advice from others, or ask others to code something for me, or (indirectly) spend some time on the project I am doing, is that fair?
Alexandre:
... GSoC projects are only partly successful, though we got some dedicated programmers from them like Johan, ...
Small correction, I was already working actively on Inkscape before I did my first GSoC. :) Probably 90% of the reason to apply for GSoC was the money.
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.
I have absolutely no knowledge of how other open source software projects are organized, and cannot judge on this one.
Ciao, Johan