On 10/11/05, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...1...> wrote:
Hi all,
The big news with Xara is finally coming out today. :-)
Xara has ported their product to Linux and will be Open Sourcing it. For more details, see http://xaraxtreme.org/. A press release is coming out, and is appended to this message.
Charles Moir has been talking with me about this privately for the past couple months. His interest is to see Inkscape and Xara be in collaboration rather than competition, and I've been sharing ideas (such as the XAR/SVG project) along these lines. I've suggesting that merging inkscape and xara codebases would probably be impractical, but it might be possible to take the best bits of both and create something better than either, down the road. It seemed wisest in the near term for them to release what they've got, and to focus on making it work on Linux, which they've now done. :-)
The key question for us is how we want to relate to Xara when the code is released. Would it make sense for us to share code with Xara? Should we merge, or remain distinct? They'd be open to sharing svn repositories if we'd like (I mentioned we've been looking to upgrade from cvs, and they already use svn)?
Anyway, check it out (a Linux binary preview is downloadable, and there's also a pretty sweet movie) and share your thoughts.
This is pretty interesting. Especially the perfomance chart at http://xaraxtreme.org/about/. If Xara's renderer is really that great and will be opensourced, Inkscape could definitely benefit from it.
I'm not sure any reasonable final decision is possible at this point. However I would prefer not seing another RealPlayer/HelixPlayer situation, when fully opensourced version of the same code looks the same but isn't interesting at all in comparison to commercial one.
Alexandre