Has it only been ONE year?
Yep, today, October 26, 2004 is Inkscape's first anniversary. This time last year we registered Inkscape with SourceForge and poured ourselves into converting it over to C++.
Our first public announcement of the founding of the Inkscape project occurred a bit over a week later, on Nov 6th, to be followed closely by our first release to Freshmeat on Nov 10th.
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=3416220&forum_id=...
It's been an amazing year with the project. We've had five very solid releases, each a major advancement over the previous. We've taken a project from scratch to being included standard in nearly every major Linux distro. Tens of thousands of people use Inkscape today!
Most importantly, we've succeeded in building a very open and prolific development team, and have been fortunate in gaining a very supportive and friendly user community.
For the year to come, I think we can look forward to gaining solutions to many of the features and issues we're worrying about right now like PDF, extensions, Gtkmm, etc. CSS will probably be a major effort, but one we'll gain a huge amount of benefit from. I think (hope) we'll see expansion of Inkscape's audience to include technical drawing in a big way. I'd like to put some effort into building up a healthy donation system since we already have users asking about that.
I also hope we can continue to expand the size of the development team and the userbase. We should continue to encourage users to peek under the hood and fiddle with stuff; I'm hopeful the extensions system will also provide an easy way for users to get involved. We would also do well to expand our efforts at demoing and presenting Inkscape at trade shows and conferences.
Congratulations and thank you to everyone that's helped us get this far, and look forward to seeing what Inkscape can achieve in 2005. :-)
Bryce