Also the guys are under intense pressure to ship a brand new
commercial
Windows release right now and so have very limited time. Indeed
right
now we have very limited number of developers purely on the
open-source
version.
Can you tell us a little about the backgrounds/interests of the folks working on the open source version? I'm looking forward to chatting with them in the future. :-)
Well the guys you may come across are Phil and Gerry both been with Xara since well before our Windows exploits back to Acorn RISC days. Phil was even involved in some Atari ST products we did in historic times. But they've worked on just about everything including Artworks the ARM based (pure assembly language) predecessor to Xara X and Impression our Quark-like DTP package. Both have huge experience across the board. Phil probably has more ownership of the technical architecture than any. Gerry has very broad experience of whole computer and Windows gamut. However neither have that much experience (perhaps none) of Linux as far as I'm aware).
Neil our CTO has Unix experience going back - more project manager, but a very good understanding of architectural and OOP things.
Er, who else. Luke might post from time to time - he's the main guy working on the Linux port right now (and has more Linux experience than any of us). Others you may come across but probably wont be posting here much.
Oh and although I'm CEO I used to program (mostly assembly language, authored the products that the company was built on 25 year ago, e.g. Wordwise a word processor that was very popular in the 80s in the UK) and so understand, in some detail, all the concepts of what we're doing. So we are a very techy orientated organisation. (Maybe that's why we're not bigger than we are because I should be more marketing oriented).
Having come from a background where every byte mattered and processors were pathetic, that's perhaps where and why we get this speed / space efficiency thing from. It also means, that as CEO, I don't get or accept any technical BS from my people about what is and is not possible. If they come to me and say "can't be done" I'm always pushing back to ask why, there must be other angles we can take, and usually we find a way. I am also a fanatic about detail, trying to find better more slick ways to do UI and cutting anything that is not necessary. I'm an total believer in the KISS principle, Occam's razor and such approaches.
And although over the decades there is not a class of software we've not been involved in, from games to databases, spreadsheets, interpreters and compilers, even hardware design, I'd say that we've been involved in publishing software more than anything - be it word processors, Postscript interpreters (this is where our rendering engine started life 15 years ago), DTP packages and graphics software of all types. So a pretty broad background.