Wilber Week 2025: El Bruc, Spain

The third Wilber Week team meeting took place from July 4th to 14th in the same place as the first Wilber Week from 2017.

We had in fact already paid a deposit before the Pandemy hits, so this would have been wasted funds not to go back!

GIMP team minutes

People present

Team members present:

Anders / ajonsson
Aryeom
Bruno / brunvonlope
Carlos / garnacho
Jehan
Michael Schumacher / schumaml
Michael Natterer / mitch
Niels / nielsdg
Ondřej / martymichal
Øyvind / pippin
Simon / nomis
Ville / drc

We were pretty thrilled to meet 3 new members: Anders (translators and heavy tester/debugger), Bruno (extroardinary packager!) and Ondřej (GSoC intern with a great future).

Planned topics to discuss

These are the topics which Jehan planned for discussion:

Funds and progression on current administrative work
Initial Grants
Future Grants
Legal issues for third-party name usage
GNOME Sponsorship
The software name
Third-party goodies shops
Simplified procedure for simpler/smaller expenses
Storing sticker’s and other goodies’ files
GSoC projects
Signing tarballs and binary packages

We were also hoping on having a few UX sessions with a few artists (present, such as Aryeom, or remotely, e.g. with Americo).

Some contributors who couldn’t come (Daniel / dnovomesky and Americo / americo_gobbo) also wanted us to organize some video calls with them.

Unfortunately not all above topics could be discussed, and the UX sessions and video calls could not happen either. For the rest, see below.

The “Council of the Ring” (nicknamed by Bruno) - 2025-07-11

On Friday 11th of July, before the first people would get home, we had a nice afternoon meeting with the full team (everyone present at the event participated). It took place in some remote hiding location between trees, which is why Bruno nicknamed it our own Council of the Ring. 😅

We tried to discuss most of topics planned, but the full meeting took quite some time so we ended up not discuss all items.

Funds

I (Jehan) made an assessment of our funds situation, and in particular of all the administrative work which we have been doing with the GNOME Foundation for the last year and a half!

The good news was that the bitcoin situation was finally done! After working on resolving this topic for so many years, we could say that — as of end of June 2025 — we had confirmation that all the bitcoins had been transferred to the foundation, converted to US dollars and moved to our accounts. 🥳

Considering that we had also voted not to suggest bitcoin donation anymore (and therefore removed the information from our website soon after) during Wilber Week 2023, this is the end of the bitcoin topic for us.

Still on the funds topic, from the information we had, it looked like we had a spike of donations after GIMP 3.0 release, though we didn’t have enough info yet (and in particular not detailed-enough info, from before and after) to be sure.

Grants

The grant topic was still in-progress, and considering it had been voted by us in October 2024, it was a bit of a frustrating topic for several members. Lawyers had been involved for drafting the grant agreements, then many back and forth discussions and misunderstanding happened between GIMP and the Foundation. There was also a new GNOME’s Conflict of Interest Policy, which we had to review and comment.

Then there was still the topic of signing “Project Leadership Committees” (PLC) Conflict of Disclosure forms, and more…

So this topic was both advancing and stalling (administrative-wise) at that time, which made for a frustrating item to discuss.

Future Grants

Our initial grants are not meant to be the last, so I wanted to already start discussing future grants, for more people too, even though the initial grants were still unfinished business.

Simon estimated it was too early to discuss this and it was suggested we wait for at least 4 months after Wilber Week to engage with this topic again, giving us time to see how things progressed.

Legal for third-party name usage

Across the years, we saw many malicious usages of GIMP (core team discussion (private)), such as badly made packaging of GIMP (not even really usable) on big “stores” (Android, Apple, Microsoft…) to make the easy bucks by misusing our good reputation. These packagers would not make it clear that they are not core team, which has the double consequence that creators paying for it would think they are supporting the official GIMP project, then they would actually be disappointed of us (thinking they got scammed by us).

We even saw people misusing the name “GIMP” and a logo clearly derivative of our Wilber logo for completely different software (still graphics software, but clearly not ours).

This topic triggered quite some discussions, and in the end everybody agreed that we had to do something and since most Committee members were present, we voted to get in touch with a laywer specialist of intellectual properties. We thought it was important enough to do it quickly, even if some Committee members were not present to vote (the number of members was enough for the majority vote).

The next day, we asked the GNOME Foundation first for advice on whom to contact.

GNOME Sponsorship

The GNOME Foundation had recently started some fundraising and the then new Executive Director had written a few blog posts explaining the Foundation was in quite a dire situation.

Though our project does already participate to the Foundation’s well-being (through our fiscal sponsor agreement), we did wonder if we could not further support our fiscal entity by donating too (note: we are already sponsoring a runner on the GNOME’s Gitlab, for every projects to use, through our funds).

Øyvind noted that the Foundation’s Conflict of Interest Policy itself may prevent us from supporting our fiscal sponsor.

It was proposed that instead of donating untargetted funds, maybe we could support one of the Foundation’s events, like GUADEC. But the next GUADEC was just 2 weeks from Wilber Week so it felt too late to be a sponsor for it as most posters and documents had likely already been printed out.

It was decided that we should raise the topic on the Committee tracker and go for a specific vote, but this topic died out when 2 days later (when still at Wilber Week), we were faced with a new policy by the foundation about “Releasing GIMP Funds” (i.e. a policy about releasing our own funds!), which triggered a lot of incomprehension among us. [Note: fortunately this new policy got canceled soon after]

Funding for third-party made goodies

We had a request by a third-party goodies shop to be on the website. They are already donating back a part of their sales (of GIMP-branded goodies) to the project so they are telling us that it would be beneficial for everyone if they had more visibility.

I note that I appreciate the fact that they are a Free-Software focused goodies shop (not a generic goodies business) and that it’s a small shop (not some uncaring multinational). I do worry about the ecological and social side of such business and wish to make sure they follow good practice. Quality is essential too (good quality also means longer usage, hence more ecologically responsible).

I also raise that there seem to be other small Free-Software focused shops. For instance, Inkscape is in contact with another (as was discussed with Marc Jeanmougin, Inkscape developer, during Libre Graphics Meeting 2025, who was wearing an Inkscape hoodie made by one such shop).

Simon worries especially about quality control. He wants to make sure that if the project puts its name officially, then it should not be crappy quality. The idea of asking for samples was also suggested.

We also did wonder if we should care about the percentage of sales being donated to us.

In the end, what was decided was:

We should wait for trademark concerns to be handled;
We want to ensure a minimum quality control;
We could ask for a few samples;
It should be made clear that it’s a non-exclusivity acceptance and therefore other similar shops may also be listed eventually;
We should make sure they don’t oversell our relationship and that we are not seen as responsible of anything they sell. In particular, such shops should use wording such as “with permission” or “authorized”, and not “official”.

Simplified procedure for simpler/smaller expenses

There was the question of whether we wanted a simplified/accelerated procedure for voting small expenses, such as sticker printing. Right now, even when it’s something barely 100€ or 200€, we’d have to make a full vote with majority of the 9 Committee members.

Not only this, sometimes people external to the core team may want to print stickers of GIMP for local events, conferences, workshops… We believe that the GIMP project could reasonably sponsor such events with small expenses, when it’s done for sticker making or other goodies.

Should we send stickers across the world? This seems unreasonable if the event is from the other side of the planet when the local organizers could just as well have stickers printed for cheap in a local printshop. Should we just fund such expenses based on invoices after a vote?

Again, Simon raises the quality control issue. We knew it already, but we again experienced during last Libre Graphics Meeting that printing is often an involved process, with every shop having their own requirements, sometimes weird ones.

In the end, Simon suggested that he would take on the responsibility of sending stickers himself, to local organizers who would request any such stickers. We could make public calls to make it known that people can request stickers for events.

For other types of “small” reimbursements, we decided to delay any decision for a further reconsideration, if needed.

Second Meeting - 2025-07-12

On Saturday evening, we held a second meeting. Unfortunately some contributors had already left. The main topic was the project name.

It was a bit of a difficult topic because there is a lot of good memories and feelings around the project. We will not go into details in these meeting minutes. Enough to say that there even were tears from several grown adults.

In the end though, we couldn’t come to a reasonable decision yet on this difficult topic.

Last updated on November 10, 2025

Libre Graphics 2025: Nuremberg, Germany