On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 08:04:49PM -0300, bulia byak wrote:
Overall, I can't help feeling very positive about this whole thing. I love it that their motivation - to create the best vector editor on Earth - is exactly the same as mine. And no matter which of our two programs gobbles the other, we now have significantly better chances of reaching that goal than we did yesterday. As for increased competition for Inkscape, I agree with Mental that this is healthy.
At this stage, I think what we need to do is find the "common ground" between our two projects.
There are many differences that we *could* focus on. They're commercial oriented, they communicate and work in different ways than us, they have a different codebase using a different widgetset, we hold SVG to be the main purpose while they are geared for drawing in general, and on and on. We could easily allow these differences to define us as distinct groups and keep us separate, to the detriment of both. It's easy in human nature to divide into us-vs.-them groupings.
But consider that we do have a lot in common. Both of us want to bring a very powerful open source graphics tool to the world. We want to have the best open source vector drawing tool, Xara wants to have the best vector drawing tool period (wouldn't it be great to achieve that!) We want to have a really good alternative to Adobe and Microsoft products; they do too, perhaps even more fervently than us! Looking at the GUI, it's also evident that we share ideas on how the GUI should look - the differences between us are in the details, not the fundamentals.
There is strong potential for some solid common ground between us. Also look at the steps they've already taken to try to bridge our differences. They've ported their application to Linux, so it will be easier for us to try it out (think about how painful it'd be to us Linux guys if they'd have only released code for the Windows version), they've open sourced their code under the GPL (thank god they didn't choose some incompatible OSS license), and are funding someone related to Inkscape in an effort to bridge the file format issue between us.
I see a lot of potential benefits for us in working with them. As others have mentioned, it opens several alternatives for us to finally address the Pantone issue. Several people have mentioned other problems that we could finally solve by leveraging their codebase, like Corel Draw support, a better renderer, various features we lack, and the best performance in the industry.
We also have strengths that we can lend Xara. They're new to this whole open source thing, so will need to learn the types of best practices that we've benefitted from with Inkscape; we can help teach them this culture. We've got some excellent processes for involving users in solving issues that come up. We have built a strong name in the open source community and with our cooperation they can leverage our community successes. We know how to do iterative development using an evolutionary release approach. And perhaps most importantly, we have skilled developers to lend to the cause. We have expertise in areas that they don't, especially in packaging and supporting multiple operating systems. Mike Hearn has already taken the initiative to share some of this experience with them, I'm sure we can give them a lot more tips and suggestions going forward.
Looking at other organizations that combine open source and commercial aspects, we can see how others have benefitted. The Linux kernel community has benefitted greatly from symbiosis with Redhat, Novell, IBM, etc. in terms of funding, jobs, increased visibility, and so forth. Commercial organizations can also provide a level of QA that goes beyond what the community can achieve alone; Ubuntu/Debian and Netscape/Mozilla give good models of how this can be a win-win-win relationship for the community, business, and users. I bet Inkscape can achieve the same with Xara.
However, building good relationships takes work, it's not something that just happens. It's way too easy to fall into the us-vs-them trap, and gain nothing; it will take work on our part to help show them how open source works, to encourage them to brave the risks, and forgive their missteps as they learn the dos and don'ts. We need to find ways to try out new ways to communicate with them, and look for opportunities where we can work together on things and get to know each other. Success builds on success, so even small collaborative achievements in the near term can lay good groundwork for future possibilities. I have no idea how this will turn out in the long term, but the trick is going to be to get off on the right footing here at the start; if we do good things now, we can get ourselves on a good path that will lead someplace very cool down the road.
Bryce