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Krita Foundation in Trouble

krita.org

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Re: Krita Foundation in Trouble

#221
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Legally, the hired professional is an advisor. The board/management are collectively responsible for picking a good advisor and double-checking his/her recommendations. Bottom line: no one takes responsibility for anything (unless they're on the board) and you are on the hook for everything. This also applies to lawyers, property professionals, medical professionals, engineers, architects, and so on. Of course th…

There's no reason why this is outrageously unfair. An external consultant is only held to an advisory standard because they are external - they are not party to the detailed nuances that management may have inadvertently or deliberately concealed.

It's outrageously unfair because when you hire an advisor you typically know so little about their domain of expertise you have no idea what questions to ask them.

So you have no effective oversight over the quality - or otherwise - of their work.

Of course you can hire another professional to double check the advice of the first professional, but that soon gets expensive, you're pretty much guaranteed some angry muttering, and you're still not guaranteed a reasonable outcome.

It's a remarkable fact that consumers have more rights when buying a toaster than when hiring an accountant or lawyer - and the toaster is going to be more reliable, and much less expensive to run.

Re: Krita Foundation in Trouble

#223

Can I buy something rather than donate ? Its hard for me to donate using my company account - but very easy to buy stuff. It doesnt matter even if its a license to email you 10 times a year.

Sure: we have a shop full of stuff: https://krita.org/en/support-us/shop/ (though the website is still being hammered...)

Does the money from the shop go to foundation or just to the creator of the content?

Re: Krita Foundation in Trouble

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not easy. Or if it is, would you do it for us? There's really no "us", it's just a bunch of people together on the internet. Except for write access to our website, you're as qualified and authorised to do the legwork as I am. Even receiving donations is complicated, which is why we're grateful that the FSF does it for us. I've also heard mixed reports about whether this would help with a revenue stream or not.…

Why dont you write in to https://stripe.com/atlas . It is run by @patio11 - the resident god of running self-sustaining software companies. I dont know of anyone better to either help you or advise you. We all want you to succeed. Trust me - it may feel we are condescending, but it comes from a desperation to not see great open source software die. So please excuse my language if it offended you.

[deleted]

Re: Krita Foundation in Trouble

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not easy. Or if it is, would you do it for us? There's really no "us", it's just a bunch of people together on the internet. Except for write access to our website, you're as qualified and authorised to do the legwork as I am. Even receiving donations is complicated, which is why we're grateful that the FSF does it for us. I've also heard mixed reports about whether this would help with a revenue stream or not.…

Why dont you write in to https://stripe.com/atlas . It is run by @patio11 - the resident god of running self-sustaining software companies. I dont know of anyone better to either help you or advise you. We all want you to succeed. Trust me - it may feel we are condescending, but it comes from a desperation to not see great open source software die. So please excuse my language if it offended you.

I'd always be happy chatting with an OSS project about monetization options -- email me any time, work-related or otherwise. I should also write about it a bit; thanks for reminding me to do so.

Minor corrections:

a) Atlas is built by a team of smart people.

b) Although I appreciate the praise, I am just an entrepreneur. There are many on HN and elsewhere who do that better than me. I get mildly frustrated by how we sacralize the mechanics of business, because this is one of the reasons why smart people who know what compilers are come to believe that a sales tax filing is an impossibly high barrier.

I firmly believe that anyone capable of writing a meaningful software product can run a company. We're trying to make this radically less daunting than it is right now; if particular problems about running a company (OSS or otherwise) worry you, we'd love to hear what they are and brainstorm how we could possibly help.

Re: Krita Foundation in Trouble

#226

Can I buy something rather than donate ? Its hard for me to donate using my company account - but very easy to buy stuff. It doesnt matter even if its a license to email you 10 times a year.

I hear this all the time with Octave too. What exactly constitutes a purchase? How can we help you fool your company into thinking that you're buying something?

You're not fooling anyone. You're assisting your user in navigating organizational complexity required to pay a preferred software vendor.

At my previous companies, the only thing I would need to purchase software was an invoice/receipt I could point to to show that I had purchased a software license. The contents of that license don't matter, and in fact, I even told a few projects "Please invoice me for a commercial license of your software. If you don't have a commercial license, I will accept your existing [e.g. MIT] license as a commercial license. If you do not have a price list already, I will accept a quote of $1,000 without any further negotiation required; just send me an invoice for it."

I think that software developers are really weirded out that the same bits can be free-as-in-beer and _also_ cost $1,000. [+] But _software buyers want to purchase outcomes, not bits_. The outcome I want to buy is "$PROJECT continues to exist in the world." I have sufficient internal authority to purchase this outcome, as does the other commentator on this thread -- we've announced that fact loudly, as does anyone else who either requests a quote or actually pays you. I have sufficient legal authority to purchase that outcome as an officer of the company I was employed at, which enjoys an incredible amount of discretion in how it chooses to spend its own money in the pursuit of its legitimate business objectives, and which has chosen to invest that discretion in me. Reasonable third parties might disagree with our expensing policies (or think they shouldn't have hired me), but reasonable third parties don't get a vote.

[ + ] I sold trial-based software, and a fair bit of it, for many years. The difference between a trial version and a registered version was... nothing at all, if you just compared the binary artifact. The sole thing that distinguished the two was that, if you proved to the software's satisfaction that you were a paying customer, it would act like it was registered (displaying that fact and removing the trial limitations). This was, literally, a single if statement.

Could I have sold software on that same model without the trial limitation at all? Clearly yes; registration would then only cause the software to display you were a registered user. Could I have sold software on that same model with the only display that you were a registered user being outside the software? Yes. How about if that were _only displayed on the purchase confirmation email itself_? Absolutely freaking fine.

None of this gets harder or legally murkier with OSS in the picture.

Re: Krita Foundation in Trouble

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure: we have a shop full of stuff: https://krita.org/en/support-us/shop/ (though the website is still being hammered...)

Will you release any of the Made with Krita books as eBooks/PDFs in the near future? I don't think I'd be open to forking over 12 EUR for shipping. I'd gladly pay 8 EUR for an eBook edition though.

That's a good point... We totally underestimated the shipping costs, and as a result, we've got boxes and boxes of the things around! I'll try to add it to gumroad today.

Re: Krita Foundation in Trouble

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will you release any of the Made with Krita books as eBooks/PDFs in the near future? I don't think I'd be open to forking over 12 EUR for shipping. I'd gladly pay 8 EUR for an eBook edition though.

That's a good point... We totally underestimated the shipping costs, and as a result, we've got boxes and boxes of the things around! I'll try to add it to gumroad today.

Done, it's in the shop now. Three pdf's: cover and content suitable for printing, and content suitable for viewing on a tablet are in the package.

Re: Krita Foundation in Trouble

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this all the time with Octave too. What exactly constitutes a purchase? How can we help you fool your company into thinking that you're buying something?

You're not fooling anyone. You're assisting your user in navigating organizational complexity required to pay a preferred software vendor. At my previous companies, the only thing I would need to purchase software was an invoice/receipt I could point to to show that I had purchased a software license. The contents of that license don't matter, and in fact, I even told a few projects "Please invoice me for a commercia…

But I don't want to actually sell anything. I just want your money. You can get the software, working or not, with or without the money. You are telling me that in order to get your money I have to sell essentially nothing.

It's a stupid dance for a donation while we're telling the people paying that it's not really a donation. We have to fool them and pretend like it's a business transaction.

I wish we could just be honest and lose the stigma around donations.

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