On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 07:55:19PM +0100, Charles Moir wrote:
In the long term, it's a bit less rosy. Only a few bits of code are easy to borrow from program to program; most are difficult to impossible. Merging the two programs is not too realistic. Living side by side is more probable, but that means competition. Competition is tough. There's only so many Linux people interested in vector graphics, and they will need to decide which project to contribute to. Few if any people will be able to learn both codebases to contribute to both. This will hurt us (developers drain) and this will hurt Xara ("hey, we went open source, why so few contributors?").
I think this is the core point, and very well put. It's hugely difficult to see how this can be done. The best I can suggest (and I'm not the first to suggest this) is that we find ways to create shared libraries, tools, palettes, add-ons, whatever.
This would be a good opportunity to pimp another project that Inkscape's been participating in, called create.freedesktop.org. It's an effort to come up with some standards for all open source graphics programs such as where color palettes, swatches, gradients, clipart, etc. are stored, so that these graphic resources can be shared across all of the user's tools, whatever their preferences.
http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
This is a fairly new project (doesn't even have a logo!) but there's a wide range of participation from several projects. The idea is interoperability; despite our differences, all of us open source graphics tools can be stronger by sharing art resources.
Anyway, put that in your todo list to check out next month or so when some of the fires have died down. Long term you'll want XaraExtreme to be part of, or at least aware of, those discussions.
Bryce