Hi everyone, I got a second, so here's some thoughts.
Sorry it's so long, but I picked up on a few of the points made in this thread. I apologise for not saying from whom I'm quoting.
I think Cairo is the better horse for the long term. As the Cairo developers start moving towards hardware acceleration, comparing them with a piece of software is simply unfair. GPUs today are impressive, and if Cairo can tap into even a small percentage of that it'll be crazy.
I agree - we'd also like to move towards Cairo, for the simple reason it's clearly becoming a Linux standard in the way Quartz is on the Mac and it will be hardware accelerated. No matter how much faster our rendering is now, we'll not compete against hardware.
But we also want to support Quartz on the Mac, Avalon (or whatever is called this week) on Windows because they are the native vector rendering engines that are also hardware accelerated. So our medium term plan for Xara was to have user switchable rendering engines. XaraDraw, Quartz, Cairo, or whatever. This would also limit the feature set to that supported by the corresponding engine. So, for example, I think only XaraDraw and Quartz can support grad transparencies and so selecting Cairo would disable that feature.
But you'll be free to take our rendering engine once we make it open-source and retro-fit it into Inkscape if you wish. Should make Inkscape go a lot faster.
I've invited Charles to encourage one of his engineers, testers, or sysadmins to join the list; if they're on, I
hope
they'll jump in and say hi
I think we have one or two devs lurking here, maybe others. Neil Howe, our CTO, Phil Martin our chief techy on Xara and responsible for most of the architectural stuff. Gerry and Like may also be lurking, and appear from time to time.
But as Bruce says changing a company culture to be open in way you guys are is difficult. We all have to be careful because we represent a commercial company that can get sued, and because we have paying customers.
Also the guys are under intense pressure to ship a brand new commercial Windows release right now and so have very limited time. Indeed right now we have very limited number of developers purely on the open-source version. Hopefully in a week or two that will improve. But they have very limited time to respond to all the posting that they might be inclined to.
As a graphics software only company they are directly in competition with Inkscape - thus, all this code merging
talk
sounds strange (I don't see Trolltech trying to merge their code with Gtk or vice-versa - interops yes, merging no). Most successful commercial companies in the open source community have made it thru services: part add-ons, part support, part operations, part packaging,
part data warehousing, etc - I think to be viewed as an open source friendly company Xara needs to operate in terms of being a graphic design services company utilizing community software as a base - but they haven't exactly said what they are thinking along these lines...
Well that is what we hope. We hope to continue selling commercial versions, especially into our existing Windows market because there will also be a part of the market that wants customer support, those licensed elements that can't be part of an open-source product, such as Pantone, our PDF exporter includes licensed libraries, the Live Effect plug-ins, even mundane things like boxed versions, CDs and printed manuals. If there's demand we'll sell those extras into the Linux community as well. Having commercial versions of the product is not a bad thing, I believe it helps an open-source project. There's some info about this on our FAQ http://www.xaraxtreme.org/faqs.html
Well, after reading the e-mail you've forwarded, I'm not optimistic. The reason being that they still seem focused on being in control.
Now
I don't think they should release a totally random project, but if
they
are going to never give an outside developer access to their version control, the barrier for contribution is too high.
We will give outsider developers access to svn, but we're not going to let any old hacker one off the street have write access without at least some checks. I think it was Bryce who mentioned you guys also have a quality control standards, as do all successful open-source projects. In the end it just comes down to trust and if a developer shows he can be trusted we'll provide greater access all the way to complete un-vetted write access. I don't think we'll be any different to other OSS projects.
But we are in control of our official Xara branded tree - doesn't stop anyone building their own version with their own additions - just as, presumably, anyone can take Inkscape and do the same (you did it to Sodipodi didn't you?). It's GPL - people have the freedom to do what they want with our code.
Well, I'd say that we could steal code from them, but it is unlikely that they'd want ours -- for the simple reason that it seems they need
copyright assignment.
No we do not want copyright assignment. We think that's unfair as it take rights away from the author. More details on our FAQ under the licensing section, which has been updated recently. http://www.xaraxtreme.org/faqs.html
But our best idea is that is that if people want a patch incorporated into the main Xara release that they dual license it GPL and BSD, they keep all their rights, and we, or anyone else, can use it in a commercial version. Open to suggestions as to how else we make this possible, but in order for any OSS project to really succeed in the wider commercial world I think having a commercially supported version is a good thing. If people choose to say want Pantone they should be able to pay for it.
I don't think even most current developers could claim copyright to large sections on Inkscape. I wouldn't even want to try and figure out all the copyright issues in Inkscape.
Ah well that could be a more serious issue. We can't, any more than anyone can really, accept contributions if the copyright is not clear. Too dangerous.
In the long term, it's a bit less rosy. Only a few bits of code are easy to borrow from program to program; most are difficult to impossible. Merging the two programs is not too realistic. Living side by side is more probable, but that means competition. Competition is tough. There's only so many Linux people interested in vector graphics, and they will need to decide which project to contribute to. Few if any people will be able to learn both codebases to contribute to both. This will hurt us (developers drain) and this will hurt Xara ("hey, we went open source, why so few contributors?").
I think this is the core point, and very well put. It's hugely difficult to see how this can be done. The best I can suggest (and I'm not the first to suggest this) is that we find ways to create shared libraries, tools, palettes, add-ons, whatever.
Here's an idea, just off the top of my head. Inkscape wants to move to Cairo, so do we. We also want to continue using XaraDraw for its speed and greater range of rendering types, especially in the case there is no hardware assisted rendering, so it seems do some of you guys. On the Mac we (and you) should be using Quartz because this is about to become hardware accelerated as well. They all have varying capabilities, but are based on a similar PDF 1.4 style rendering model.
So why doesn't someone do a sort of Ultra-draw wrapper super-API library thing that we can both use. i.e. it provide one super-set rendering API that itself calls down to XaraDraw, Cairo, Quartz depending on user or program preferences. And then we'd both use this ultra-draw and both gain the desired benefits. Quartz, Cairo and XaraDraw are similar enough to make this not too huge a job I would guess.
And perhaps that's the type of approach that could be used going forward. Eric's Uber-converter is a similar thing. We both get to benefit from that.
Why do we want to do this? Well the easiest route is that we just live side by side competing, more or less. You steal our code, we steal yours. A lot of time is spent re-implementing features one way or another. Both sides will probably benefit to some extent, but is it the way to really move forward?
The bigger picture is that Adobe just bought Macromedia because they are concerned, rightly, that Microsoft are going after them. So they combine number 1 and 2 to stand a better chance against Microsoft. Meanwhile if we're not careful Xara / Inkscape are like two little ants spending their tiny resources competing against each other - irrelevant and insignificant to Adobe / Microsoft *and* the majority of potential users out there.
I sort of would hope combining that benefits and efficiencies of "the open-source way", with the best of what you've got and the best of what we've got and then we might be a credible realistic alternative to the big-guys. And that's not just the Linux market but the much wider market. Oh and while vector drawing might have been regarded as relatively niche in the past I don't think it should be. The whole world is moving to be vector based (all three operating systems are on the verge of using vector based UIs). Personally I don't believe there should be such a separate, and artificial separation between bitmap and vector graphics programs.
Vector graphics should be the prime, first class citizen, of computer graphics. It should be the first graphics program that people buy and want to use. Rich vector graphics is inherently more powerful and flexible. Just think about the scriptable opportunities in this space. (Our Webstyle template based product takes this approach. It takes professionally designed vector template graphics and allows dummy-users (i.e. those with little design skill - and that includes me and most that I know) to customize the graphics, colors, wording, scale and in a vector way. It's perfect for creating vector UI components, such as buttons, icons etc. A hugely powerful concepts that opens Vector graphics benefits for the rest of us. We're only touching the surface on that side.
Anyway having said all that, in the short term, possibly medium term even, we are going to be living side-by-side because our gaol is to get the whole of Xara Xtreme ported and working as is, and we're trying to resist making improvements, taking anyone's features. That's partly because we think it's in everyone's interest to have a compete product working ASAP, but also because only once we've got the whole lot working, can outsiders sit back and take a view on what's right and what's wrong. Then we can all sit back and see how bets to combine forces.
I suppose I'd sum it up that the result should / could be greater than the sum of the parts. That way we could all benefit, the open-source way benefits, Linux benefits because it can more readily offer mass-market and professional graphics solutions to Windows users. We all benefit because there are simply more developer bodies working for the same gaols of creating better graphics software.
Charles