Charles Moir wrote:
Hi everyone, I got a second, so here's some thoughts.
Great, you're welcome on the list anytime. Or, for that matter anyone else from Xara also. We're happy to have you as part of the open source community. I promise I won't sue for anything you say here ;)
Well that is what we hope. We hope to continue selling commercial versions, especially into our existing Windows market because there will also be a part of the market that wants customer support, those licensed elements that can't be part of an open-source product, such as Pantone, our PDF exporter includes licensed libraries, the Live Effect plug-ins, even mundane things like boxed versions, CDs and printed manuals. If there's demand we'll sell those extras into the Linux community as well. Having commercial versions of the product is not a bad thing, I believe it helps an open-source project. There's some info about this on our FAQ http://www.xaraxtreme.org/faqs.html
A couple of things here:
- Do you expect to release the Live Effect plugins as open source also? I thought so, but you listed it here as the additional features in a boxed version.
- It sounds like your initial plan is not to sell a Linux boxed version, is that correct?
- Have you looked at the embedded Linux market? One device that I'm anticipating is the Nokia 770, which will run Linux. My understanding is that the graphics application there is... well... Xara could probably help :) An uber-fast rendering engine would definitely be of interest to embedded developers. I think this could be an exciting potential market for Xara, and companies like Nokia would probably pay for the porting to their device.
But our best idea is that is that if people want a patch incorporated into the main Xara release that they dual license it GPL and BSD, they keep all their rights, and we, or anyone else, can use it in a commercial version. Open to suggestions as to how else we make this possible, but in order for any OSS project to really succeed in the wider commercial world I think having a commercially supported version is a good thing. If people choose to say want Pantone they should be able to pay for it.
I totally agree on the Pantone point, but that leads me to say, why not just leave the whole thing as LGPL and not worry about the BSD stuff. Then you can link to other libraries as need be, and sell that as your boxed version. Then users can contribute under their copyright, and licensed under a single license. This would protect you from the case where a significant contribution could be integrated by Adobe without any contribution to the community.
Here's an idea, just off the top of my head. Inkscape wants to move to Cairo, so do we. We also want to continue using XaraDraw for its speed and greater range of rendering types, especially in the case there is no hardware assisted rendering, so it seems do some of you guys. On the Mac we (and you) should be using Quartz because this is about to become hardware accelerated as well. They all have varying capabilities, but are based on a similar PDF 1.4 style rendering model.
I think the library that you're thinking of is Cairo itself. Cairo is designed to have plugable backends, one under development is a Quartz backend. Another planned one is the MS optimization layer. I think that if the Xara renderer could replace the software rendering done by Cairo today, then the whole Linux desktop would go faster :)
Why do we want to do this? Well the easiest route is that we just live side by side competing, more or less. You steal our code, we steal yours. A lot of time is spent re-implementing features one way or another. Both sides will probably benefit to some extent, but is it the way to really move forward?
No it is not. (I realize it was a rhetorical question, I just thought the answer needed to be explicitly stated)
Anyway having said all that, in the short term, possibly medium term even, we are going to be living side-by-side because our gaol is to get the whole of Xara Xtreme ported and working as is, and we're trying to resist making improvements, taking anyone's features. That's partly because we think it's in everyone's interest to have a compete product working ASAP, but also because only once we've got the whole lot working, can outsiders sit back and take a view on what's right and what's wrong. Then we can all sit back and see how bets to combine forces.
I think the quicker you can get repository up people can try to compile it on their systems, and they can provide ideas about what may help. Working on getting to a full working version is a very good goal, I think Inkscape maintaining CVS as "mostly working" has been a huge benefit to the project.
--Ted