Hi

Probably this has come up before, but I just saw one thing that amazed me. And that was that inscapetutorials.wordpress.com got over 10k USD when it asked it´s users.
I am a Swedish guy living in China (Inkscape fan), and I just started thinking what I could do with 10.000 USD here. I made some calculations, and I came to that with 10K, I could hire almost two really good programmers in China - and that´s full time!
For example, if we held a competition like you see in the movie The Social Network where I live in GuangZhou, we would probably get some really interesting programmers joining this project. I know that when I post jobs for my company, I get tons of (mechanical) engineers sending in their applications.

I mean, there must be thousands of us wanting to give a buck or twenty to speed up and help out Inkscapes future developement. And I´d sure rather donate for Inkscape developement than sending somebody to the Libre Graphics Meeting (even tho I think that cause is good too).

Cheers guys and gals

OK, it's like this.

First of all, you got a wrong impression of what community can do. "And that was that inscapetutorials.wordpress.com got over 10k USD when it asked it´s users." —This was a Pledgie for Libre Graphics Meeting. It has only partly to do with Inkscape, and it tooks ca. 3 months to get that money.

We already have experience of paid work for Inkscape: both GSoC projects (some of which didn't work well) and a project by Tav on improving the text tool. Tav's project worked extremely well, but we had real problems collecting the amount for which we settled which wasn't at all impressive — mere 1.3K USD. It was collected in more than a month and we had to start the campaign twice because of losing momentum. I don't see anyone working for that money especially when there is no quarantee of getting paid.

So relying solely on donations is a really bad idea. Just for comparison, Ardour's primary developer gets only 5K USD a month from donations and that a very low income for a programmer of his qualification. He also does it in a "monthly subscription" fashion.

One way this could go is starting a foundation and doing various things like what Blender team does — paid development for clients, selling books and training DVDs and so on. But to get the ball rolling one would have to create a foundation, do some paperwork, be really good at it and, last but not least, be paid for that. So far I haven't heard of anybody willing to do that, but again I didn't ask.

One last thing is that the previous core team discussed paid development before and decided that having paid development might discourage others from contributing. That team however is barely around these days, and the new core team hasn't exactly settled yet. So maybe there is a change in views, but there is no certainty until somebody asks.

To sum it up, paid development on Inkscape means:

- the existing team is in agreement to give the idea green light
- starting a foundation and having a paid position for managing its funds
- exploring ways to have income other than donations, or else we fail
- coming up with a working donation system

Inkscape and GIMP are pinup boys of Open Source. OpenOffice sucks (hence the emerging LibreOffice). For that reason I think it's about time to give Inkscape a kick forward. Just a general thought.

I stand corrected: Software Freedom Conservancy can actually handle most if not all typical work of a foundation for the project.