Hi,

Daniel Rogers writes:

As was discussed at Gimp Con 2003 (and before, frankly) I am in the process of incorporating "The GIMP Foundation" as a non-profit organization devoted to supporting the gimp.

Thanks a lot for organizing this.

Here are some of the ideas I am currently mulling over regarding TGF:

Selling t-shirts, coffee cups, lapel pins, posters, etc. Selling printed manuals.
Selling GPL complient binary and source disributions on cd. Selling and paying people to go train and give presentations on the GIMP. Public and private grants. (someone (like me) will need to apply for these) Tax deductable donations.
buying hardware (computers, tablets, scanners, colorimeters). full color magazine ads
free training sessions
office space
accounting
legal expenses
staff
paying programmers, web designers, tech writers constructing a build farm (this would help both developers and in making a cd distribution).

This sounds a lot more like an attempt to bring WilberWorks 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). 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.

Sven

Daniel Rogers wrote:

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As was discussed at Gimp Con 2003 (and before, frankly) I am in the process of incorporating "The GIMP Foundation" as a non-profit organization devoted to supporting the gimp.

As this point, nothing (including the name) is set in stone. I have a legal clinic doing some research to help inform me about how to form the corporation and my (and its) legal responsibilities. This service is free, but limited. I will need to seek the advice of some other attorney (of which I have a list of about two potentially helpful lawyers) to anything TGF needs in the future.

What I am working on, though, is what to do with TGF. What I want from everyone else is two things: ideas about what to do with TGF and questions anyone may have about TGF. I want make sure that these things have time get discussed with the lawyer and to try to help keep our community more informed of these matters.

So please, if anyone has any questions about how TGF will work and what you would like to see it do, send them to me. I will work on providing answers.

Here are some of the ideas I am currently mulling over regarding TGF:

Selling t-shirts, coffee cups, lapel pins, posters, etc. Selling printed manuals.

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.

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 understand that this is a dangerous practice; however there are other dangers in other practices as well. I am trying to bring the gimp authors more to the foreground (which is at the core of my problem with docbook, the author credit is so far nested into the information and xslt is still such a challenge) and I guess I would rather trust each individuals ability to determine what should go to gimp and what should stay with them.

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).

I would like to buy some teeshirts, however. Any maybe if there is a particularly popular teeshirt design, we can put it into a more official copyleft sort of production.

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.

carol

On 13 Oct 2003 11:55:27 +0200, Sven Neumann wrote:

Daniel Rogers writes:

As was discussed at Gimp Con 2003 (and before, frankly) I am in the process of incorporating "The GIMP Foundation" as a non-profit organization devoted to supporting the gimp.

Thanks a lot for organizing this.

Here are some of the ideas I am currently mulling over regarding TGF:

[...]

This sounds a lot more like an attempt to bring WilberWorks 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. [...]

Sorry if this sounds like a "me too" but I would like to second this.

After watching your (Daniel) presentation at GimpCon2003 and the discussion that followed, I thought that the main roles of the GIMP Foundation would be:
- to be a non-profit organization that can collect donations without trying to sell anything by itself; - to serve as a contact point for conferences and events interested in GIMP presentations.

Selling GIMP tee-shirts, manuals, CDs and other stuff may be interesting, but I would prefer to have this done by a company that would be a separate legal entity. Otherwise, there could be some conflicts between a commercial GIMP Foundation and the companies that are already selling GIMP stuff (ftgimp, macgimp/wingimp, xdarwin and probably several others). I would like the GIMP Foundation to be seen as "neutral" and clearly non-commercial, so that the companies who are selling GIMP CDs could make a donation to the foundation without feeling that they are giving money to a potential competitor.

-Raphaël

Hi,

Daniel Rogers writes:

Sven Neumann wrote:

This sounds a lot more like an attempt to bring WilberWorks

Wilber what? I plead ignorant.

Oh well, one should really run one's own internet archive. The website seems bought off and of course not much is left to be found on google and friends. This is the best link I could find:

http://linux.rice.edu/webmap/appdescriptions/WilberWorks.html

Let's hope one of the folks involved into this can tell us more about the goals of WilberWorks and why it didn't work (that well). Perhaps there are things we can learn from it...

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.

If you put it that way (with all the other things you said in your reply) it feels a lot better already.

Sven

The [WilberWorks] website
seems bought off and of course not much is left to be found on google and friends. This is the best link I could find:

http://linux.rice.edu/webmap/appdescriptions/WilberWorks.html

Let's hope one of the folks involved into this can tell us more about the goals of WilberWorks and why it didn't work (that well). Perhaps there are things we can learn from it...

WilberWorks was founded by

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,10975,00.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.12/alt.scientology.war.html?pg=2&topic=

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.

If you put it that way (with all the other things you said in your reply) it feels a lot better already.

Sven

Sven,

The [WilberWorks] website
seems bought off and of course not much is left to be found on google and friends. This is the best link I could find...

Google deserves more credit.

Here's what Larry Ewing says:

http://www.isc.tamu.edu/~lewing/gimp/wilber.html

According to Wired, WilberWorks was founded by Scott Goehring.

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,10975,00.html

Can anyone say with certainty whether that is the same Scott Goehring that founded alt.religion.scientology?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.12/alt.scientology.war.html?pg=2&topic=

Let's hope one of the folks involved into this can tell us more about the goals of WilberWorks and why it didn't work (that well). Perhaps there are things we can learn from it...

Federico Mena Quintero and Scott Goehring reportedly worked on plug_in_whirl_pinch.

http://hans.breuer.org/gimp/pdb/byauthor.html

Perhaps Federico has a comment on Scott Goehring and what happened to WilberWorks.

Cheers,

Robin

Robin Rowe wrote:

Can anyone say with certainty whether that is the same Scott Goehring that founded alt.religion.scientology?

In what way is this important?

--Adam

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 22:26:22 -0700, "Robin Rowe" wrote:

The [WilberWorks] website
seems bought off and of course not much is left to be found on google and friends. This is the best link I could find:

http://linux.rice.edu/webmap/appdescriptions/WilberWorks.html

Let's hope one of the folks involved into this can tell us more about the goals of WilberWorks and why it didn't work (that well). Perhaps there are things we can learn from it...

WilberWorks was founded by

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,10975,00.html

I did a quick grep through my own archives, and I found the following message sent by Scott Goehring to this list in January 1998 (in the pre-1.0 days). It describes briefly what WilberWorks was intended to be. As a coincidence, it was a reply to a message that I posted earlier, about using the LGPL instead of GPL for libgimp:

From: Scott Goehring Subject: Re: [gimp-devel] The Gimp & The GPL Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 12:32:31 -0500 [...]
Raphael> Well, I wouldn't mind if some derivative of the GIMP was sold Raphael> and supported by a commercial company. It would even be a Raphael> good thing, because more people would then trust the GIMP.

WilberWorks plans to sell copies of the Gimp (the fee being for copying and distribution) and to offer support packages (various levels of service for varying fees). This is entirely permissible under the GPL: you can charge for services related to the product, including for making the product conveniently available, but cannot restrict the intellectual properties themselves. [...]

A few weeks later, Scott switched his e-mail address to scott@wilberworks.com, although he switched back to his old address in July 1998. When WilberWorks started, Raph Levien was also involved and was putting together the GIMP 1.0 CD to be sold by WilberWorks. If Scott cannot be reached, I suppose that Raph could provide more details about why the company did not fly as expected.

The last appearance of Scott was in September 1999. I haven't received any messages from him since then (I was exchanging some e-mails with him because he was the co-proponent of the RFD that I wrote in 1998 for the creation of comp.graphics.apps.gimp). The WilberWorks site and its bug reporting system stopped working in 2000 (January or February?) and the domain name expired a few months later. Once available, the domain was quickly picked up by a porn site, as you can see in this bug report:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61017 In 2002, the porn site gave up the domain name and it was replaced by the domain parking/search page that you can see now.

-Raphaël