Every year, the Libre Graphics Meeting get together to discuss cool new stuff in the Free/Open Source graphics and image editing world and make plans to make them even better. One example of the outcome of this is that you can drag and drop between applications like The Gimp and Inkscape. I didn’t know this kind of thing was going on and that’s great.

This year the Libre Graphics Meeting have a shortfall in sponsorship due to the withdrawal of a major sponsor who wasn’t able to secure the funding approval. Apart from paying for the facilities, much of the sponsorship money is used to pay for the flights and accommodation of important developers from the Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus, Blender, Krita and Open Clip Art projects amongst a number of others to ensure that the right people are at the event for it to be able to meets it’s goals. Most of these developers are unpaid and work on these projects in their spare time and so can’t afford to meet the travel costs themselves or take the time off work to attend.

Sadly, due to the withdrawal of one of the main sponsors, it now doesn’t look likely to be the case that many of these developers will be able to attend as a result and so the LGM have setup an appeal for donations in a bid to secure the funding required to get the right people to the event.

As a backdrop against this, I’ve been thinking recently that for the first time I can probably afford to put a bit of money where my mouth is regarding the software I use and so I decided to donate.

I think ideally, they need another big sponsor to reach the target by the end date of April 18th 2008 but if you’re a Free Software graphics software user then there is something you can do to help too.

We talk about this in LugRadio Season 5, Episode 15 which is released on Monday April 7th 2008 so don’t expect the link to the episode to work until after then.

You can also Digg the story to bring more attention to it.