rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

UPDATE and NOTE: This is a year old post, so its not up-to-date…oops…clearing the queue…The original post is here.

I’ve been trying to come up with unconventional ways to raise money for the small non-profit. Yesterday, someone decided to auction off their old web domain and give 90% of the money to Creative Commons. So, I started to think about all the code that is sitting on developers’ shelves, old domains, etc. I wonder if other developers would consider auctioning off domain names, old code, etc, and or just outright donating old code, domain names, etc. to Creative Commons. This code would get licensed so that it would be Open Source and I would even take the time to make a place for it that would be visible and accessible.

Does anyone have any code, failed or sleeping dot.com projects, and/or domain names they would like to donate to CC? CC could then decide what to do with these (auction, put online, developer further, etc). From the likes of the domain name auctions on Ebay, this is a great way to raise funds. However, I’m quite surprised that not more people are trying to sell their code on-line on ebay.

Also, I just now started to wonder about how to apply the similar logic of fundraising of naming certain properties after people, for the web. Like, how much of a donation would it take to get certain tools, sections of a website, or campaigns named after donors?

Maybe I should try this for my site. I could name my next open source tool after someone, for a donation of $1000 USD. Hmmm…maybe I should rename an old project if anyone is interested in this Ideally, also, the name would just be a name and the code would all stay as open source.

What other unconventional tactics can other people think of that would help CC or any nonprofit in the world, raise money to stay in operation? What new possibilities are there? So much time and money is spent on adapting and revolutionizing business, but what about simple nonprofit operations like fundraising?

Heya all, Inkscape 0.45 is out in the wild. Bryce and I sent out PR. The great thing about Bryce is that he is the master of planning. He helped to reshape Inkscape’s roadmap so we can get to 0.50 with SVG Mobile compliance and full Inkscape 1.0 with SVG 1.1 compliance. Need I say, the more contributors we get, the faster we will get there.

Would anyone out there like to help out with Inkscape by either funding development or with steps to getting involved in Inkscape? I can connect funding with developers and am eager to do so to accelerate Inkscape towards > 1.0 version numbers.

Check out the release notes and the press release:

Jon Phillips
Inkscape Announces 0.45 Release :: http://www.inkscape.org :: Draw Freely.
Draw Freely: Inkscape Announces 0.45 Release

February 5, 2007 - The Inkscape community today announced the newest
version of its cross-platform open source vector graphic drawing software,
Inkscape. Inkscape 0.45 features a new Gaussian Blur SVG filter.
Sponsored by Google’s Summer of Code program, Gaussian Blur allows you
to softly and naturally blur any Inkscape objects, including shapes,
text, and images. This enables a wide range of photorealistic effects:
arbitrarily shaped shades and lights, depth of field, drop shadows,
glows, etc. Also, blurred objects can be used as masks for other objects
to achieve the “feathered mask” effect.

Numerous other new features, enhancements to existing features, and bug
fixes have been included. A history dialog allows you to browse your
change history. Many new extension effects are added including Pattern
along Path and Color Effects. There are performance improvements to
rendering speed, on the order of 2-3% in general, and up to 5-10% for
drawings using heavy transparency and/or radial gradients. Compositing
quality is also improved through the removal of banding seen in gradients.

The Inkscape community invites anyone to contribute to the project. The
project is now working on the upcoming 0.46 release which will focus
on the initial stages of adding SVG animation support, increasing the
apps PDF functionality, and other refactoring tasks. On a global scale,
Inkscape is pushing for version 0.50 to have full compatibility with
SVG Mobile/Tiny. Then, the ultimate large goal is to get to Inkscape
1.0 which will be a fully W3C SVG 1.1 compliant application. The more
help the project receives, the faster the aforementioned goals will
be accomplished.

Download Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X packages:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93438

For many more details, see the complete Release Notes for 0.45:

http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_Notes045

Community submitted screenshots:

http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/

About Inkscape

Inkscape is an open source drawing tool that uses the World Wide Web
Consortium’s ([[W3C]]) scalable vector graphics format (SVG). Some
supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, markers, clones,
alpha blending, transforms, gradients, and grouping. In addition, Inkscape
supports Creative Commons’ metadata, node-editing, layers, complex path
operations, text-on-path, text-in-shape, and SVG XML editing. It can
also import EPS, PostScript, and most bitmap formats,
and exports PNG, PS, PDF and various vector formats.

Inkscape’s main motivation is to provide the Open Source community with
a fully [[W3C]] compliant XML, SVG, and CSS2 drawing tool. Additional
work includes conversion of the codebase from C/Gtk to
C++/Gtkmm, emphasizing a lightweight core with powerful
features added through an extension mechanism, and maintaining a friendly,
open, community-oriented development process.

Press Contact

Jon Phillips
jon@rejon.org
+1 510.499.0894

Hello everyone out there in digi-land. I’ve been pushing for this big international event behind the scenes at Creative Commons. And, its this Friday in San Francisco from 9 PM to 2 AM. Its going to be huge because it has the normal Creative Commons Salon mixture, its at Songbird’s (the great mozilla-based music player) loft in the mission, and drinks are free the entire night. Beat that!

Oh, also, the guys of SuperFlex helped brew up a special “Creative Commons Birthday Beer”. There is a limited quantity of 366 beers that are specially editioned and ready for you to get signatures and/or drink them.

If you are curious about plugging more into this event, check out the CC Bday wiki page and jump on in. Also, if you are NOT IN SAN FRANCISCO, there are a few different celebrations happening in other countries like China, Netherlands, Italy, and Denmark.