On Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 09:32:20AM -0500, MenTaLguY wrote:
On Fri, 24 Mar 2006 09:31:43 +0100, Tobias Jakobs <tobias.jakobs@...128...> wrote:
But if Cairo gets Xara renderer, it will be just as fast.
Carl Worth (Cairo) talked a lot with the Xara programmers at the LGM. And as far as I know the plan was to make Xara's renderer GPL and then write an Caito backend.
Hmm. That sounds hopeful, but I wonder how that works with Cairo's LGPL/MPL license otherwise?
If the Xara Cairo backend remained GPLed, then only GPL/LGPLed software could use that particular backend (not a problem for *us*, but...), and it couldn't replace the default software backend in Cairo (or else Cairo would be useless to non-GPLed software).
I chatted with Carl a bit about this. Cairo actually has support for multiple "backends", and there are several (~5?) officially supported backends, plus a couple dozen unsupported ones. The Xara renderer could be provided as a backend that would only be available when using the GPL license option for Cairo. He said the application linking to Cairo would need to pass a string like "I am a GPL application" in order to activate it, or something like that. I also thought this was something worth checking out if it comes to be.
Bryce