On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 06:06:05PM +0100, Jon Cruz wrote:
A lot of that is still developing at the moment. Xara is set to give a Up front, though, there are a few things I can mention. First is that Xara has several people there at the LGM, is showing what they have done so far, and have put out their source code. The other main thing is that several Inkscape people have already been spending time talking with the Xara folks, and plan to get more in this weekend.
I had a couple good long talks with the two Xara reps here, and have a meeting with Charles (the CEO) when he gets in tomorrow. So like Jon said, things are still developing. It's very cool that they did the release to coincide with this meeting, as it's given us Inkscape guys (and Cairo - Carl Worth is here too) a good opportunity to get some firsthand info.
One thing that seems clear is that Inkscape and Xara are not exactly the same thing; there are things like compositing that Xara has a huge edge over, and other things (like drawing usability) where Inkscape has an edge. In a sense, you could think about like how Inkscape, Gimp, and Scribus all have some overlap in certain features, yet each focuses on a different niche; possible we could see Xara take up a position between Inkscape and Gimp, serving as one in a set of great tools in an artist's toolkit.
Of course, the major, major challenge here is interoperability. For users to be able to use Xara alongside Gimp, Scribus, and Inkscape, it must have good SVG and/or PDF support, and ideally should participate with us in ensuring that consistent shortcut keys, menus, etc. are followed. I'm hopeful we can approach these the same way we approached them with Scribus, making adjustments to each program in a few areas for the sake of consistency. Obviously, this will take some direct IRC discussions between Inkscape and Xara in the coming months.
The Xara guys are very cool and seem quite open to discuss things. They've got a lot of hopes for working with the community, but of course have a major cultural shift from proprietary to open source. I think a key for them is to attain a good level of transparency into their processes (i.e., more use of the mailing lists, public bug tracker, attending developer conferences like this one, etc.) A lot hinges now on the community; now that they've released the code, the next thing will be to see contributions from us.
There are some challenges, however. Since they are using a different widgetset from us, this prevents direct sharing of UI code. While both Inkscape and Xara are GPL, there are a few licensing differences; for example, Xara has a Contributor's Agreement for code submissions, which means we need to take some care about the copyright history of any inkscape code we give to Xara (fortunately, Xara->Inkscape looks more straightforward).
Carl Worth has been taking a look at the internal renderer, "C-Render", and the feasibility of hooking that into Cairo. This is the one piece that has not yet been open sourced, however it sounds like the plan is to release it under GPL later on. Hopefully, if the community responds well to the current open sourcing, they'll be comfortable to release that piece quickly, because if it gives Cairo a performance boost, that'd help the larger community a lot. (Also would give us a bigger motivation to migrate Inkscape to Cairo too).
Anyway, so things are still a bit early but seem to be progressing well. More to come...
Bryce