Short Summary
Hello! My name is Konstantin Dmitriev. I am animator and developer with a special interest to free software.
In May 2013 I have received Shuttleworth Foundation grant, which I decided to put into development of Synfig - free and open-source animation software. Thanks to that, since August 2013 we have a full-time developer (Ivan Mahonin), who works on the code, and grant money go to pay for his work. Since then, me and Ivan collaborate to make Synfig better and you can track our progress by reading my weekly reports.
We have enough money to fund our work until November 1st, 2013, but my goal is to continue intensive development of Synfig as long as possible, that's why I'm running this campaign.
This campaign allows our users to directly influence the Synfig development by choosing development priorities.
How?
Please read below.
"Development Priority" perk
We will spend next month working on the priority you defined.
Generally, the development priorities in our work defined by me. I understand that not everyone is happy with my decisions and someone might want particular feature done sooner. So, for a donation of $300 we offer to the donor an exceptional privilege to choose a priority for the next month. Of course, we can't promise any thing, so please select from the list below:
- Single-window UI
- Frame-by-frame animation support (bitmap only)
- Improve tools for cut-out animation
- Bones tools
- Sound support
This is a "Development priority" perk and of course only one such claim available.
Please note: We don't guarantee the feature from a selected priority to be completely finished within a month. Such promises are not compatible with development realities. What we promise is to dedicate no less than 85% of our working time to developing this priority for a full month. Though, one month is a significant period and such dedication would lead to significant changes in selected direction. Many our users are aware that we used to publish development snapshots regularly, so you will be able to benefit from development results as soon as possible.
"Development OS" perk
By default we use Linux operation system (OS) for daily development (because we love Linux). As result, the Linux version of Synfig is the most polished, because it goes through daily proof.
But, for a humble donation of $250 you can make us shift to other OS for next month. So, if we will use the OS of your choice in our daily development, then obviously the Synfig version will be especially polished to work on it: daily proof => more testing => less bugs => better stability.
No worries, this perk doesn't mean we drop support for other operation systems. It's just a question of choosing the OS for daily development.
At the moment the only OS available for choice is Windows.
Other perks
We understand that there are people who just like what we do and want to give us support to continue sustainable development of Synfig. Specially for them we prepared other perks to express our gratitude:
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Tutorial video. A tutorial video about Synfig for ANY given theme. Length is limited to 5 minutes. Languages can be English or Russian. Video will be publicly available for everyone. The tutorial video will be produced by Nikolai Mamashev - he is working on the Synfig Training Series at the moment.
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Report sponsor. One of my weekly reports will be indicated as sponsored by you with an (optional) link to your website. The mention will look as "This report is sponsored by: ..." text at the top of the report text.
The Impact
With this campaign we provide a way to control the direction of development and support vitality of Synfig development at the same time. Users can choose the priorities and collected funds will go to support further sustainable development of Synfig. It's fair and benefit is for everyone - we all get better free animation software.
