Inkscape

Hey Alexandre,

It smells fishy, but it could also be an opportunity which just
appears "off". To even consider it we would need to know who the
companies are and to get information about them (Who are they? Where
are they based? How long have they been around? What work history do
they have? etc). Have they taken into account that Inkscape is
cross-platform and it would need to work on all platforms? Not to
mention that the developers will need to actually sign up for the
developer-list, introduce themselves, discuss their plans, etc. And if
they don't want commit access (to avoid 2 patches for each dev
involved), we need for them to work in a public branch so that
progress and revision history can be tracked. Have the developers even
looked at our codebase? Do they have experience with other open source
projects? If so, which one(s)? Honestly, this is just tip of the
iceberg stuff.

I think there's a lot of risk of us putting up news and we need to
protect the project and our users. They are really going to need to
impress me before I would be willing to consider backing it. For now
though, until we get a ton of info (and my ability to verify it) as
well as communication going, they won't get my support.

Cheers,
Josh

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 5:47 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine
<alexandre.prokoudine@...> wrote:
> Hello board,
>
> A day ago I was contacted by Łukasz Remiś who started this campaign:
>
> http://www.indiegogo.com/Advanced-PDF-export-plugin-for-Inkscape
>
> to raise funds for development of advanced PDF exporting featuring
> CMYK color separation and more.
>
> I immediately told him. CCing Jon Cruz and Josh, that $800 is not
> going to make it and that before he decides on amount of money needed
> for that, he has to decide, how exactly he does it, and this is best
> discussed with the team.
>
> The reply came few hours ago and it basically boils down to the
> following: he claims to have done a finanical research and found two
> companies willing to do that work for $800. So he wants me to post
> news on inkscape.org about the kickstarter.
>
> In all hoinesty. I think this is bullshit. This is clearly not a $800
> goal, and those companies don't have a clue. And since I don't see the
> guy contacting *anyone* in the team, at least publicly, I'm inclined
> to ignore the request until he contacts the team and they come to
> agreement about implementation, scope of the project and real price.
>
> The problem here is that he thinks he's right, so he might try
> reaching to a wider audience, and then it's going to be a disaster. He
> already posted that on inkscapeforum, and it's a blessing this hasn't
> ended up on omgubuntu yet.
>
> So, this is the current state of affairs. Whether any decisions should
> be taken, is entirely up to you. Personally, I'm not doing anything
> until I see an agreement between kickstarter orgs, team and whoever
> agrees to work on it.
>
> Alexandre
>