Scaling up: was Fundrasing for FOSS Projects - meetup this saturday

On Mon, 18 Mar 2019 21:52:11 -0700
Bryce Harrington <[email protected]> wrote:


> But a message we've been hearing consistently is that people want to
> see Inkscape scale up to take on larger challenges.  Being completely
> developed by volunteers in their spare time, it's hard to assemble
> enough manpower to do everything that needs done, particularly for the
> less sexy items, and some stuff is just completely out of everyone's
> wheelhouse so never gets tackled.

Be careful what you wish for. 90% of the times I've seen software
projects, FOSS or otherwise, scale up to take on larger challenges, the
result is an inefficient solution to those challenges, combined with a
watering down or complete destruction of what made the software good
before in the first place.

And when such upscaling projects are flush with money, they tend to
dive in first and make foundational decisions later. Good software gone
bad.

When the time comes that an improvement is really compelling, those who
want it will include someone with the knowledge to go into the code,
find an approximate insertion point for the new feature, perhaps even
get it to run, and then tell the Inkscape developers about it.

But in my opinion, scaling up for the sake of scaling up is the surest
way to mess up a project.

SteveT