Miguel,
As the webmaster, I can tell you that the website reports increases in traffic year on year.
Either more people are downloading Inkscape or more people are trolling our website.
But Inkscape is not Gimp, and we don't deserve to be labeled as 'stagnating', if anything, we're a recovering project. Maybe 4 years ago Inkscape was in trouble, with no major release for years and years, an old creaky website, a very small user participation and a fragmented online presence.
Now we have hackfests and excitement and a new marketing team run by a non-developers. We've turned this ship around (or it's still turning but getting there). And we're starting to think about how to rehabilitate svg for ourselves too.
Thusly, I refute your argument as incorrect.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
On Tue, 2017-08-08 at 20:55 +0000, Miguel Lopez wrote:
There's no way to get all the data in time as it would take a while to extrapolate all the comments in the internet, but I'll tell you that with reddit for example, there has been less positive responses with GIMP funding needs than say other rapid developed open source project overall (at least I seen a person want GIMP as a dead project because he had enough of stagnating development, and then there's another who won't donate to GIMP developers because he doesn't see the point of supporting a stagnating project). In comparison with Affinity Photo, and Krita, GIMP is behind and GIMP has been developed for 15+ years and have loads of web support over the years. And the amount of visitors to GIMP tutorials has decreased over time. Basically, the potential of getting funds reduces over time, and so the overall amount of people who decide to stop using a program. I'll probably come up with data by 5 weeks as I'll be on break there.
As with many projects that has stagnating development, there is bound to be negative responses over time, and some would want certain projects dead because they are literally tired of stagnating development. My point is this is something to be considered when it comes to future development of Inkscape, but as you said, our situation is not quite looking good and it'll get worse over time. It does not help that Inkscape is the only decent open source vector program out there, and Sk1 isn't really acceptable. So, the main question to ask: "What is the earliest viable approach we can start at resolving funding issue?". The earlier, the better.
I forgot to mention another issue that's putting us in a bind. SVG Support throughout web browsers. If SVG Standards can't improve, at some point, we're going to have to sit back and think about whether pursuing the SVG format is worth it, but unfortunately, so many people depend on SVG, and SVG development as a format is stagnating. That's another issue to think about.
On 8/8/2017 12:43 PM, Martin Owens wrote:
On Tue, 2017-08-08 at 16:03 +0000, Miguel Lopez wrote:
On the Krita side of things, there's one thing we have to offer. Interchangability between Krita vector layer, and Inkscape. This is the first time in open source history where such a thing comes closer to Photoshop and Illustrator interaction. If that can be improved, indirectly Inkscape becomes more viable. There's a way to get Inkscape SVG ported into Krita file. Krita file is essentially a .zip file, and in Krita 4.0 Pre-Alpha, there is content.svg. If you edit that, and then convert the .zip file back to .kra, you have your Inkscape SVG in Krita file. Easy-peasy. Problem with that idea is always development taking so much time, but that is reality. Someway, I do think interactions between software developers is the key to having Inkscape develop at a faster rate. Right now, we do not have much options here. Kickstarters might not help at this stage as Inkscape reputation is decreasing. Likewise, GIMP has that very glaring issue.
Miguel,
Is it decreasing because you think it is, or because you have data to back this up?
I don't mean to be annoyed with you, but please be kinder to the process. We're trying to leverage up our capacity here, but that's a delicate process that needs hope and help.
Inkscape is currently built by part-time developer volunteers. We'd like to move that up to full-time developers. And really, professionals have no good way to ask for anything at the moment, hopefully we can change that and get the needs of users properly accounted for within the funding structure.
But until that's in place. We can't catch-22 the "reputation" of inkscape at this time. Please be patient while we try and get this working.
Best Regards, Martin Owens