Bryce Harrington wrote:
One thing to keep in mind is that one of the argues AGAINST a company open sourcing their codebase is a worry that "then they'll just take our code, and we'll fail." So I think it would be most prudent to talk not about snagging code, but _sharing_ it.
Oh Bryce, you're being so polite :) Seriously though, they need to figure out how they want to deal with the community. Until they define that publicly, I think most discussion here is speculation. I'd also imagine that they have engineers reading this list, and the fact that they haven't commented yet says that they're not entirely sure yet. Hopefully they've gotten some good ideas on how people will react to several scenarios.
And, you know, it would not be at all incompatible with later Cairofication. Cairo is simply the lowest-level layer of the rendering stack.
Charles and I also discussed Cairo a bit. They're aware of Cairo, and some collaboration is certainly possible there too in the future, but Xara's renderer is *tons* faster than Cairo at present, so that's even more of a concern for them than it's been for us.
While I see that, 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. Now, I realize that a renderer includes more than Cairo, but unless they're interested in having their renderer interface with Cairo I think it is significantly less interesting. I'm not sure that WxWidgets is ever planing on interfacing with Cairo directly, so there may be some technical limitations as well. That will require more investigation, there may be ways to use both.
--Ted