Quoting bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...>:
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.
I think it would still be the healthiest situation overall. Without Sodipodi in the picture there is always the danger of Inkscape becoming fat and lazy. ^_-
Also, I doubt we will see much brain-drain of existing developers between the two projects, and if both projects are drawing developers to Linux, attracting developers for a particular project is not necessarily a zero-sum situation.
What Xara is going to have to figure out is how to overcome their licensing disadvantage, though. Dual-licensing using an existing "commercial-friendly" license (e.g. MPL or something -- inventing their own would probably be a mistake) would be a better alternative than requiring copyright assignment, for example.
In some areas, it might work best for us to "meet in the middle" and do some things as LGPLed libraries which could be used equally by a commercial Xara and the GPLed side (Inkscape or GPL-Xara).
In those cases, there would be no asymmetrical barriers to contribution -- to the extent they both used those libraries, both projects would benefit equally from any work on them.
-mental