What lab are you at at MIT? We need to setup a donation system. Bryce or myself can funnel funds to Inkscape, as we don't have a group account setup currently.
Presently what we encourage instead of cash is contributions in kind (e.g., chip in with tutorials, documentation, code, or whatever strikes your fancy). That's the most directly effective and efficient way to show your appreciation and to help make Inkscape better.
This is hard for a group like ours where we have lots of financial resources but limited time. Most of the people I work with would be excellent inkscape users, but they're not quite at the level of coding, and those of us coding have our hands quite full (must...finish...thesis) Thats why I was suggesting a support or priority bugfix option. To buy "contract software" as an institution requires an enormous amount of headache and paperwork, whereas support agreements and boxed software are purchased daily without a second thought. And, with all of that, I would love to chip in with code help as soon as this blasted thesis is done. I'm writing a lot of gtkmm-code right now, too, so perhaps I might be of some use come this summer. Again, thanks for making such a spectacular piece of software... ...Eric