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- -- Dan
daniel@phasevelocity.org

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Carol Spears wrote:

When I looked into this sometime back, I watched the gnome foundation elections on the irc. This is probably not the best view of a foundation, however, I really wanted nothing to do with it.

We don't need to structure our Foundation (or even have membership) if we don't want to. Further we can have our own rules for determining membership that may or may not have anything to do with democracy.

It seems like if there is money available to aid with TheGIMP, the easier it is for the people to contact the person most involved with this area -- then the decision can be made by the person who is to do the task or what have you.

I am not following what you mean here. Are you suggesting that the people most invovled in the project decide who or what gets funded?

If you develop TheGIMP right now, and you get offered some money, it is difficult to give any of it back. Having a place and an easy interface to deposit money would be nice I think, and good therapy for any who received more than they gave (deep down everyone knows).

Everyone knows what?

Yea making it easy to provide donations would be cool.

I am not certain if I am making sense (again); but no matter what is going on and all the evidence against this belief, I tend to believe more in individuals and their conscience than in "organizations". People can get and install gimp on their own. Selling a distribution is sort of like preying on the ignorant. This has happened to me, and I didn't like it.

I don't want to pray on the ignorant. Selling cds would be clearly marked as a fundraiser (and probably priced as such). However, is should be possible to inform people of the fact that The Gimp is free and you don't need to buy it.

-- Dan

Sven Neumann wrote:

This sounds a lot more like an attempt to bring WilberWorks

Wilber what? I plead ignorant.

back to
life than what I was imaging from such a foundation. IMO it should be a lot less commercially oriented but maybe I am only getting a wrong impression from looking at this list. I don't think a GIMP foundation should share any interests with companies like for example MacGIMP. IMO a foundation should not sell anything. It should serve as a representant of the GIMP developers and it may accept donations (actually that's one of the major points).

And donations would be one of its major points. However having a reliable source of money, like manual and chachka sales can only help TGF be more helpful. Basically, _anything_ TGF does will cost money. The more money it has, the more helpful things it can do.

The FSF foundation, for example, collects membership dues (which are tax deductable donations) and sells tshirts, pins, stickers, posters, manuals, cds, has a corporate patronage program, in addition to seeking out private donations. The gnome foundation at least has tshirts, coffee mugs and the like that it gives to big donators, and is making some kind of noise about setting up a store. The mozilla foundation doesn't have these things, but I am willing to bet that they will in the future.

Essentially, I can't run this thing forever, for free. There needs to be some way of making enough money to reliably pay for things like filing fees. Besides, people are more willing to donate money if we can give them something for the donation.

As for being a representative of the GIMP developers, I think this should be TGF's primary responsibility. However, doing that also costs money. There are phone bills, mailing costs, travel costs, gas costs, my accounting is _almost_ free but will still cost something (and accounting is important to keep our tax-exempt status).

It should also help to
create contacts between the GIMP community and people that seek for advice or need speakers. But IMHO there should be no t-shirts, no printed manuals, no CDs and most importanyly no ads. If someone wants to do this kind of stuff, feel free to found a company and try your luck.

Yes. I hope I haven't mislead people into thinking I am trying to start some kind of commerical venture.

Believe me, I am not. However, I am trying to think of as many ways as possible to be as helpful as possible to the gimp community. All of these things require money. Paying for things like the next GimpCon, and making presentations happen are some of the best ways I can come up with to help the Gimp Community. I want to do these things. If I am doing these things, then I feel TGF is being successful. However to be able to do these things we need money. The more money we have, the more successful I feel running TGF.

As far as printed manuals go, I think they are important. I really like printed documentation (it is waay better than online documentation) and I think printed manuals go a long ways toward encouraging people to use (and thus donate to!) the gimp. Binary packages are in this same vein, but, I think, less important, since distros (and Tor) will prepare packages for us.

--
Dan
daniel@phasevelocity.org

Also,

I fear my first email may have been a bit to rambling to be able to actually get my point across.

What I am hoping to discover by encourging this conversation is what ways people would like to help with TGF and in what ways people would like to see TGF help them.

I would also like to get any questions about TGF role, my role, and anyone elses potential role answered as completely as possible. Sticky legal questions, if posed soon enough will be something I can pass onto my lawyer.

I want to get people as excited as I am about the potential that TGF has to help the GIMP.

-- Dan
daniel@phasvelocity.org

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Sven Neumann wrote: | Thanks a lot for organizing this.

you're welcome.

- -- Dan
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For those of you who were wondering why you couldn't verify my signiture: there you are.

I had forgotten this problem existed. Thanks, John, for informing me of this.

John Dietsch wrote:
| Daniel, Where is your public key? I can't verify your signature | without it.
| John Dietsch

Well, I had forgotten that gpa doesn't let me export keys. I have now exported my keys to pgp.mit.edu (and thus most other keyservers), manually.

Also, here:

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