April 18, 2008
libre graphics meeting
No Comments
As I noted earlier, Vincent Untz pushed us over the magical bar of $10,000, and since then there has been a steady flow of donations. In addition to the $10,510 currently on the site, there is another $418 in uncleared checks that will appear early next week in all likelihood – we are only $1072 from reaching that $12,000 target now (reduced from $20,000 yesterday) with a little less than 24 hours left in the campaign.
So rejoice! For after this evening, you will not be seeing any more begging letter/progress report blogs from me. It’s taken a lot of time over these past two weeks, but I must admit I’m delighted with the result. And if anyone wants me to shut up early, one $1100 donation should do it 😉
April 17, 2008
freesoftware, libre graphics meeting
No Comments
…well, for some definition of famous (and certainly mine).
Without wanting to play favourites (I love all our donors) here are some names that stood out when I was reading through the donors list earlier: Michael Tiemann of OSI and Red Hat, Bdale Garbee, everyone’s favourite gentle giant from SPI and HP, Garrett Lesage and Andreas Nilssen from the Tango project and more, Stephen O’Grady of RedMonk, Ilan Rabinovitch, chief bottle-washer of SCALE, Nicolas Spalinger of the Open Font Project, Chris Messina, the man behind the original incarnation of SpreadFirefox, John Bintz, who gave a great presentation last year on using the GIMP and Inkscape for comic drawing, Andy Fitzsimon, Aussie artist & Inkscaper extraordinaire, Louis Desjardins, last year’s organiser, Eric Sink, future GUADEC keynoter and co-founder of AbiSource, Adam Sweet from the LUGRadio crowd (where are the rest of ye, lads?), Steven Garrity of SilverOrange, best known for his work on GNOME and Firefox, Mark Wielaard of Classpath, and the rocking Jon Phillips of Creative Commons and Inkscape.
Modestly forbids me from mentioning myself (damn!).
If you’ve been holding out until the last minute, notice is served – we are now closing in fast on $10,000 raised, and the campaign ends tomorrow at midnight, PST. I am hoping that we will reach $12,000, which would be a great achievement, even if it does fall short of the original $20,000 goal. To that end, I’ve just changed the campaign goal to be more realistic – let’s see if we can get $2,000 more in the remaining 36 hours.
Update: Jealous of all the attention other famous people were getting, the very famous Vincent Untz jumped in and pushed us over the magical $10,000 level last night. That was quickly followed by donations from the famous Behdad Esfahbod and the famous Paul Cooper. And I don’t know how I failed to mention a friend from ILUG, Padraig Brady, also famous in his own right. Thanks guys! Keep ’em coming!
April 16, 2008
freesoftware, gimp, inkscape, libre graphics meeting
2 Comments
I just listened to LUG Radio 5×15, including my interview about LGM this year. And I have to make a correction. I have tried, but I cannot find any way to drag & drop or copy & paste a curve from Inkscape into the GIMP. I can go via the intermediary of an SVG, since importing gradients and curves from an SVG drop or load is supported in the GIMP, but I can’t figure out how to drag & drop elements from the Inkscape canvas into any other application – when I hit the edge of the window, it just starts scrolling. And cut/copy & paste isn’t any more successful.
Any Inkscape people out there able to set me right?
One interesting drag & drop thing I love showing to people is dragging a chart created in Gnumeric into Inkscape – the drop is a proper SVG, and you can ungroup & manipulate individual elements from the chart in your favourite vector graphics application. Which is nice.
April 16, 2008
libre graphics meeting
5 Comments
The donations have really picked up again after the weekend, and with another $350 in uncleared e-Checks last night, we now have over $9000 collected (with $650 not yet up on the site). I wonder if we can get over $10,000 today…
April 15, 2008
General
7 Comments
There are two questions about Creative Commons for which I don’t really have an answer, I thought that this might be a good place to ask.
- Can a company use CC BY-NC (or any other NC licenced) music as hold music for its phone system? Since it’s a company, playing the music to eventual clients, at least one person I know has decided that he’s not allowed to use NC music for this purpose, but there doesn’t seem to me to be any commercial application of the music here. Is this a grey area, or is there a clear-cut answer one way or the other?
- Can I distribute a translation of a document released under CC BY-ND-NC? Or does a translation count as a derivative work? And if I can publish the translation, does it also have to be under BY-ND-NC?
Update: The consensus seems to be that the answer to (1) is “this is unclear” and the answer to (2) is “of course I can’t”.
April 14, 2008
libre graphics meeting
No Comments
The suspense is killing me – we’re approaching 200 donors and $8000 – I wonder which barrier will fall first, and whether we’ll reach both by this evening…
I am amazed to see this many people coming out to support us! Thank you all.
Update: The $8000 barrier fell first, with the 199th donation – which is either a $300 eCheck which has yet to clear (and is thus not up on the pledgie site yet) from Garrett LeSage or a $100 donation from Per Christian Henden which cleared straight away.
Including Garrett’s donation we’re now up to $8454, with 4 days to go, including today, until the end of the campaign.
April 11, 2008
libre graphics meeting
No Comments
I’ve been writing a series of articles on the things that have struck me about the Libre Graphics Meeting over the past few years. But I wasn’t there last year, and there were 150 people at LGM in Lyon, and close to 200 people at LGM Montreal. So over the next couple of days, I would really like to see others tellus about their experiences at the Libre Graphics Meeting, the memorable encounters they’ve had, the fall-out after the conference and those funny personal stories that characterise many conferences.
So come on everyone, share! I would really like to hear what other people’s experiences of the Libre Graphics Meeting are, as we head into the second week of our fundraising campaign.
