I think you misunderstand Chris.

They've not taken Godot private, they've done something more interesting. Letting it continue the way that it is, but choosing to develop an enterprise with different branding and other aspects.

To put this into Inkscape's perspective. Nothing changes for Inkscape™, inkscape's money would remain Inkscape's, to sit around doing nothing year after year. But we, as developers, designers and other contributors could choose to spend our time developing a company which would pay us to contribute to Inkcape. This would be a sort of partnership. But this is highly speculative and I don't have a lot of details from what W4 have done regards to their relationship with their FOSS project.

Martin,

On Wed, 10 Aug 2022 at 15:44, C R cajhne@gmail.com wrote:

Sounds fine to me. Obviously we want to make sure that Inkscape's funding goes for all the things we've been discussing. Also be interested to see how this would change how Inkscape gets money. I guess it just wouldn't be called "donation" anymore. I'd like to make sure that Inkscape's compiled binaries are still available for free. We should do our fundraising other ways. If you can collect that info from Godot, I'd be very interested to know how they are going to go about doing this.

Thanks for looking into it, Martin! -C

On Wed, Aug 10, 2022 at 8:27 PM Martin Owens doctormo@gmail.com wrote:

...

Dear PLC & Devel,

This is an interesting bit of news. Godot, which is a member of the Software freedom Conservancy, and one of their largest other projects have had their leadership set up a for profit company called w4 games. This is ostensibly to develop Godot further.

"Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need." - https://w4games.com/

This is interesting to us here I believe. One of the conflicts I have personally with the SFC is how constraining and limited the SFC are for many of the things that would allow Inkscape to grow, invite commercial partners, hire developers, pay mentors, fund marketing research and design. Material things that we currently patch together with very kind support for key volunteers, but should be more properly resourced.

Has anyone here had thoughts about developing a commercial company to develop Inkscape?

I'm going to be reaching out to the new Godot business as well as a few of their contacts to see what their thoughts are and see what I can learn and if we can copy them.

Best Regards, Martin Owens _______________________________________________ Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org

On Wed, 10 Aug 2022 at 16:16, Ted Gould ted@gould.cx wrote:

Personally I think the biggest opportunity for Inkscape there would be to provide "certified" builds for the educational market along with support services. We've gotten many requests for those, and it's hard for us as an open source project to provide the appropriate guarantees that they require. Also, many school systems have started requiring support for all software approved for their computers (a good requirement, but again hard for us to handle as a volunteer project).

I agree with this speculative analysis. I do see some non-education partnerships are possible, but with the caveat that those partnerships have to be built and aren't freely available. Mostly I think improving trust in the productive capacity of Inkscape would encourage more commercial participation. Which I think is basically the service you're talking about here, but perhaps more speculative.

Martin,

Sorry to chime in late. I think Blender has something similar going on with the Blender Institute B.V. (vs Blender Foundation), though I don't know all the tax status nuances of the two in the Netherlands.

I certainly wouldn't be opposed to a few developers getting together and forming a for-profit business, or for interested folks creating a training/support business, or many people doing these things. With contributors straddling many countries, I think it would be challenging to attempt to create just one business, but if the interest is there, then why not? The software license keeps Inkscape free, just like Nextcloud, WordPress, Linux, etc. which have symbiotic relationships with commercial entities.

What constraints are imposed on the project from its management by SFC as a non-profit? Can we provide any kind of official endorsement of such business(es)? What would we require in return for such an endorsement? Could such entities solve some of our organizational, promotional, development challenges and be contract by the project via SFC directly to do so?

I suspect that there will be concerns about how this could corrupt the project, namely by souring feelings among those who donate their time. That should certainly be considered because the project still functions primarily by the effort of those who are not paid (by the project at least). I don't see anything in our licensing that would prevent such businesses from forming though, though. I think getting in front of that possibility (and embracing the opportunity) by answering these questions and drafting guidelines on how to support such outside, for-profit entities, especially those that enhance the core mission of the project, would be a good idea.

Those are my initial thoughts. I'm interested to know what others think.

Ryan

On 8/10/22 16:40, Nathan P. Johansen wrote:

I agree with Ted on this strategy. -NPJ

Sent from my iPhone

...

On Aug 10, 2022, at 2:17 PM, Ted Gouldted@gould.cx wrote:

Personally I think the biggest opportunity for Inkscape there would be to provide "certified" builds for the educational market along with support services.

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Pursuant to our conversation, I left a message in summary of the approach to bring Inkscape to public education with this office:

202-245-6940 Institute of Education Science Research Branch Department of Education

https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_devel?msg=erCBb7swCr7mmxZvn

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 19, 2022, at 2:42 PM, Ted Gould ted@gould.cx wrote:

 On Aug 19 2022, at 3:07 pm, Ryan Gorley ryan@freehive.com wrote: What constraints are imposed on the project from its management by SFC as a non-profit? Can we provide any kind of official endorsement of such business(es)? What would we require in return for such an endorsement? Could such entities solve some of our organizational, promotional, development challenges and be contract by the project via SFC directly to do so?

Nothing really. We're welcome to determine those relationships generally, just we need to be transparent about it. As long as the Inkscape foundation remains committed to improving and building Inkscape in an open manner and not a corporate tax dodge, I think the SFC would be supportive. The SFC is very flexible generally, they just want to ensure we do not put their tax status at risk.

I've got about half a document written on redoing the sponsorship program to take this into account. Hoping to post that next week, thanks for stealing my thunder man 😉

I suspect that there will be concerns about how this could corrupt the project, namely by souring feelings among those who donate their time. That should certainly be considered because the project still functions primarily by the effort of those who are not paid (by the project at least). I don't see anything in our licensing that would prevent such businesses from forming though, though. I think getting in front of that possibility (and embracing the opportunity) by answering these questions and drafting guidelines on how to support such outside, for-profit entities, especially those that enhance the core mission of the project, would be a good idea.

I think that a lot of difficulty arises less based on getting paid, as much as people tend to work at different paces and are able to keep up. For instance, if there is a group of paid developers and they're going to work on Inkscape 40 hours a week, and it'll move more quickly, and it'll be harder for others to keep up with all the things happening to be able to contribute. Also, they'll likely rely more on synchronous communication modes like chat, and that's the only place that things would be shared which is impossible to keep up with if you're not working full time on it. Sync is often easier but it increases the barriers for volunteer contributions.

Hopefully any company that hires those folks would be interested in the community management folks that largely work to ease over those lines. They're good at making sure that there are on-ramps and awareness of all that is going on the project. But, if they're not, that would be a role that we should ensure gets filled.

Ted

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