On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 02:00:27 -0400, bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> wrote: Most useful :) Thanks a lot! Alexandre

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: 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. ;-) 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: 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. Love to have you involved. :-) Bryce