Sorry: I must ask for context.

Why does Inkscape need money?

Can you give some idea of how much we spend each year and how much we take in? Doesn't need to be a full income statement, but hit the high points.

Andrew

On Fri 15 Mar 2019 23:59 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:

Reminder: Tomorrow (Saturday) is our fundraising meet up. Come join us to learn about fundraising for free and open source software projects, and bounce ideas around.

On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 04:56:11PM -0400, doctormo@...155... wrote:

On Sun, 2019-03-17 at 13:47 -0700, Andrew Kurn wrote:

...

Why does Inkscape need money?

The low budget requirements are for things like hackfest travel, hotels, stickers, posters, hardware, DNS, trademark registration, legal defense, (and then accountancy because of said needs for money).

Depending on the source of money, there can be lots of things Inkscape could do with a good budget. We've been using money for a long time now.

With the support from sponsors and our generous donors, we've had more than adequate funding to cover all of the expenses we've incurred. Inkscape is quite lucky to have such great support from so many.

But a message we've been hearing consistently is that people want to see Inkscape scale up to take on larger challenges. Being completely developed by volunteers in their spare time, it's hard to assemble enough manpower to do everything that needs done, particularly for the less sexy items, and some stuff is just completely out of everyone's wheelhouse so never gets tackled.

Many other open source projects have achieved sustainability after working on scaling up their financial support. The recent activity around funding is inspired by these other projects, and is hoping that if we all invest effort on Inkscape's funding, we could potentially shift Inkscape to a reliably sustainable model.

...

Can you give some idea of how much we spend each year and how much we take in? Doesn't need to be a full income statement, but hit the high points.

Bryce publishes an account each year. I think he'll be happy to post it again here.

Sure, here's the high points:

Year Income Expenses Change Total FY2006 $3,399.50 $3399.50 $3399.50 FY2007 $10,232.65 $-4,718.00 $5514.65 $8914.15 FY2008 $358.48 $-460.98 $-102.50 $8811.65 FY2009 $2,784.57 $-500.00 $2284.57 $11096.22 FY2010 $4,803.28 $-2,081.60 $2721.68 $13817.90 FY2011 $8,798.50 $-2,314.98 $6483.52 $20301.42 FY2012 $6,957.72 $-1,653.90 $5303.82 $25605.24 FY2013 $8,068.04 $-2,501.70 $5566.34 $31171.58 FY2014 $13,338.47 $-9,604.68 $3733.79 $34905.37 FY2015 $12,829.87 $-10,970.43 $1859.44 $36764.81 FY2016 $13,058.44 $-8,077.25 $4981.19 $41746.00 FY2017 $43,932.18 $-4,772.44 $39159.74 $80905.74 FY2018 $64,687.41 $-23,314.87 $41372.54 $122278.28

For FY2019, estimate $10k expense for the Pasadena hackfest, and probably another $10-15k for the one in Saarbrücken this May. No idea what income to expect in FY2019 - if we worked hard enough at it, could we double the 2018 numbers?

If this sounds at all intriguing to anyone, and you'd like to pitch in, ping me off list. We're going to be building a new team in Inkscape, like the Vectors team, but chartered to focus on financial matters. This could be a great way to contribute non-technically, and make a huge impact towards the project's long term future.

Bryce

On Mon, 18 Mar 2019 21:52:11 -0700 Bryce Harrington <bryce@...983...> wrote:

But a message we've been hearing consistently is that people want to see Inkscape scale up to take on larger challenges. Being completely developed by volunteers in their spare time, it's hard to assemble enough manpower to do everything that needs done, particularly for the less sexy items, and some stuff is just completely out of everyone's wheelhouse so never gets tackled.

Be careful what you wish for. 90% of the times I've seen software projects, FOSS or otherwise, scale up to take on larger challenges, the result is an inefficient solution to those challenges, combined with a watering down or complete destruction of what made the software good before in the first place.

And when such upscaling projects are flush with money, they tend to dive in first and make foundational decisions later. Good software gone bad.

When the time comes that an improvement is really compelling, those who want it will include someone with the knowledge to go into the code, find an approximate insertion point for the new feature, perhaps even get it to run, and then tell the Inkscape developers about it.

But in my opinion, scaling up for the sake of scaling up is the surest way to mess up a project.

SteveT