On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 04:59:11PM -0500, Ted Gould wrote: > On 09/22/2017 04:04 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote: > > > > Does this thinking make sense? I don't want to proceed with putting out > > a request if I'm not convincing enough to ensure we're on the same page > > here. But if you are willing to give it a shot and will support this > > plan, I'm prepared to put this call for sponsors next week. > > I agree with you, especially that time is the critical resource. My > concern would be that we send out an email saying "we need this." Then a > month's time we end up sending another email saying "Just kidding, what > we really *need* is this." etc. etc. I think we end up destroying our > own credibility. > > So I think that we should, in the initial proposal we should list but > have less detail about options that we'd also consider acceptable. Worst > case is that we turn someone down who can offer one of those because we > got a better offer. But at least we don't end up running some sort of > Dutch Auction of server donations.
I hear where you're coming from, and those are totally valid points, especially about keeping the phrasing flexible and more suggestive than proscriptive. That said, I'm not too worried that we might come off as 'asking for the moon', though. Indeed what got me thinking solidly in this direction was a talk with MrDocs some months ago about Scribus' hosting arrangements. They have a hosting sponsor provision a hand-me-down machine, and their development team maintains their collection of services on it; it seems to be working out well for them. After that I surveyed various other projects of stature similar to ours to see what they do, and found that Scribus is far from unique. In particular, I took inspiration from ffmpeg's hosting sponsorship request from a couple years ago[1]. I also took note that the projects were assertive in requesting the sponsorship in most all the cases I looked at, almost to a theme. So I draw confidence that we shouldn't be embarrassed to do similarly for Inkscape. We're a good project, with a strong reputation and a history of good partnerships with sponsors. We know that there are lots of people and organizations out there that would love to help us in tangible ways, and this could be a perfect opportunity for someone out there. > You're better at text than me, but spitballing: "We need to have hosting > for these things: X, Y, Z. Ideally we could put them on a single machine > to lower admin overhead. We think that machine would look like: ABC. > We'd be happy for other proposals or offers for one or more of the > services independently, especially if they came with some administration > support, but are hoping to keep things as simple as possible." Sure, I'm down with making the request a bit more flexible. I'll try respinning it with this feedback taken into account. Thanks for the feedback. Bryce 1: https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2015-July/176176.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Inkscape-board mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-board
