On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 00:02:09 -0700, Ted Gould wrote:
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.
Well, no more than Linus is in control of the kernel.
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. I think we've got roots in a project where one entity controlled the repository and rewrote all the patches ;)
For what it's worth, whilst this model clearly didn't work for Sodipodi it works very well for Wine in which the only guy who has write access to CVS is a guru-like benign dictator. Now Wine is very different to a drawing app and the same model would probably be needlessly inefficient there, but we get through about 10mb of patches per month which is a huge amount and so far, Alexandre has scaled to meet the load.
So even in the unlikely case Xara do go for this model, please don't write it off because of that, it can still be a lot of fun when done right!
thanks -mike