How is that for user response! Same day turnaround! It also helps when cool users provide mockups of what they like. There are so many ways to contribute to the project!

I have to say that I'm both very grateful and very impressed. Have these changes been checked into CVS yet? (I'm not very skilled with cvs and not quite sure how to check myself)? Is there any way to donate to inkscape, or do the developers have amazon wishlists posted anywhere? It would be great if I and my lab could say thanks and further inkscape's development at the same time... ...Eric

On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 02:05:44PM -0800, Jon Phillips wrote:

On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 19:38 -0500, Eric Jonas wrote:

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How is that for user response! Same day turnaround! It also helps when cool users provide mockups of what they like. There are so many ways to contribute to the project!

...

I have to say that I'm both very grateful and very impressed. Have

these changes been checked into CVS yet? (I'm not very skilled with cvs and not quite sure how to check myself)? Is there any way to donate to inkscape, or do the developers have amazon wishlists posted anywhere? It would be great if I and my lab could say thanks and further inkscape's development at the same time...

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.

On the other hand, if you've got money *burning* a hole in your pocket, we can certainly take it as Jon mentions, however we have not yet solidified plans for what we'd use it for, so you'd have to just trust that we'd eventually put it to some good use. ;-)

It would be great to get support from your lab and endorsement. It would also be great to know more about your research so that we can promote this on our website.

Currently, we have been thinking that we need to get donations/funding towards a windows computer and macintosh computer to do testing. So, we would have to discuss this further on the list how we would like to handle funds.

Right, plus in addition to hardware, two other ideas are subsidizing of travel costs for developers to a desktop Linux conference, or sponsoring development for file format converters (so that we could add better support to Inkscape for importing autocad, visio, and the like.)

If anyone has some time and would like to assist me in organizing any of the above ideas, the help would be most appreciated! :-)

Bryce

On Fri, Apr 01, 2005 at 09:05:49PM -0500, Eric Jonas wrote:

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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.

Ah, interesting points. I'd imagine a boxed software approach might be feasible. We've discussed bug bounty systems but decided it would be more of a hassle than a help, and I doubt we'd ever set something like that up. Other approaches are doable, though, as long as it seems to be fair on all sides and wouldn't risk building up expectations too highly.

For what it's worth, here is my reasoning for why "contributions in kind" is such a good approach: Consider a bug that takes 10 hours to fix. At $50/hr, that's $500 dollars, well above what a single user would pay for a graphics application. Maybe five users could combine funds to meet that, $100 each. But instead consider if those five users instead each put in just two hours of work helping with some non-technical tasks like writing documentation, or answering questions of other users, or even just creating really cool art to stimulate other developer to want to contribute. Those are all things that the coder would have to do himself otherwise, so it saves him the time that he can put into adding features or fixing other bugs. :-)

That said, I'm sure there'll be more and more people who want to support the project but haven't the time - or worse, that we'll run out of non-technical work to be done! ;-) So I agree we ought to investigate additional ideas.

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...

Love to have you involved. :-)

Bryce