On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, Chris wrote:
I don't know about the license problem that was mentioned. As far as I know AGG is using a BSD-like free license.
At the time we were primarily in the market for a library to do various path operations (e.g. boolean union, etc), which is handled by the GPC portion of AGG. Although the overall AGG license is GPL-compatible, the GPC license is not.
OK. I thought Sodipodi used librsvg and at some point Inkscape changed to livarot.
Originally Sodipodi used libart as its renderer, and then Lauris wrote his own renderer. After that, Inkscape forked and we brought in livarot to do boolean operations on paths, but not rendering at first.
We eventually found Lauris' renderer to be unmaintainable, and pressed livarot into service as a renderer too. It has its own problems though.
In principle I don't think I'd object to using the non-GPC portion of AGG for interactive rendering. I would certainly eventually like to offer a renderer based on it as a choice for bitmap export.
The only downside in terms of capabilities is maybe the lack of hardware acceleration (versus Cairo), and that AGG isn't a "finished" graphics API -- it just gives you a lot of tools with which to roll your own.
-mental