Hi guys, I've had little luck with sponsorship this year, and I know that the peopel I've asked have all said the same thing - "there are so many conferences, we just don't get why this one is important to our business".
I would like to propose that we go straight to the community for funds. Graphics applications rank among the most desired applications on Linux - PhotoShop, Illustrator, AutoCAD, DreamWeaver and Visio are the top 5 missing applications on Linux according to a Linux Foundation survey. And yet there's no corporate money being spent improving the free software apps out there. The investment from Google and others is going into making commercial apps on Windows work better on Linux. What we need to do is publicise the Create project, publicise the concrete results we've achieved out of the last 2 LGMs (XCF2, improved drag & drop between graphics apps, shared swatches, other shared resources, SIOX integration into Blender, ...). The list is pretty long. Above all, we've achieved a cohesion across different projects which will benefit us all moving forward. And then we say that we're short money for the conference, and we ask for donations. I can have a Paypal account set up (I suggest asking the GNOME Foundation again to set up a specific account for us), and we can all spread the news on our various project websites, and throughout the web. I'm sure we'll raise over $10,000, perhaps much more. This will also be a data point for companies representing the interest in free software graphics apps on Linux. What do ye think? Should we go for it? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: +33 9 51 13 46 45 Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13 _______________________________________________ CREATE mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create
