Hi everyone, I got a second, so here's some thoughts.
Sorry it's so long, but I picked up on a few of the points made in this thread. I apologise for not saying from whom I'm quoting.
I think Cairo is the better horse for the long term. As the Cairo developers start moving towards hardware acceleration, comparing them with a piece of software is simply unfair. GPUs today are impressive, and if Cairo can tap into even a small percentage of that it'll be crazy.
I agree - we'd also like to move towards Cairo, for the simple reason it's clearly becoming a Linux standard in the way Quartz is on the Mac and it will be hardware accelerated. No matter how much faster our rendering is now, we'll not compete against hardware.
But we also want to support Quartz on the Mac, Avalon (or whatever is called this week) on Windows because they are the native vector rendering engines that are also hardware accelerated. So our medium term plan for Xara was to have user switchable rendering engines. XaraDraw, Quartz, Cairo, or whatever. This would also limit the feature set to that supported by the corresponding engine. So, for example, I think only XaraDraw and Quartz can support grad transparencies and so selecting Cairo would disable that feature.
But you'll be free to take our rendering engine once we make it open-source and retro-fit it into Inkscape if you wish. Should make Inkscape go a lot faster.
I've invited Charles to encourage one of his engineers, testers, or sysadmins to join the list; if they're on, I
hope
they'll jump in and say hi
I think we have one or two devs lurking here, maybe others. Neil Howe, our CTO, Phil Martin our chief techy on Xara and responsible for most of the architectural stuff. Gerry and Like may also be lurking, and appear from time to time.
But as Bruce says changing a company culture to be open in way you guys are is difficult. We all have to be careful because we represent a commercial company that can get sued, and because we have paying customers.
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. Hopefully in a week or two that will improve. But they have very limited time to respond to all the posting that they might be inclined to.
As a graphics software only company they are directly in competition with Inkscape - thus, all this code merging
talk
sounds strange (I don't see Trolltech trying to merge their code with Gtk or vice-versa - interops yes, merging no). Most successful commercial companies in the open source community have made it thru services: part add-ons, part support, part operations, part packaging,
part data warehousing, etc - I think to be viewed as an open source friendly company Xara needs to operate in terms of being a graphic design services company utilizing community software as a base - but they haven't exactly said what they are thinking along these lines...
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
Well, after reading the e-mail you've forwarded, I'm not optimistic. The reason being that they still seem focused on being in control.
Now
I don't think they should release a totally random project, but if
they
are going to never give an outside developer access to their version control, the barrier for contribution is too high.
We will give outsider developers access to svn, but we're not going to let any old hacker one off the street have write access without at least some checks. I think it was Bryce who mentioned you guys also have a quality control standards, as do all successful open-source projects. In the end it just comes down to trust and if a developer shows he can be trusted we'll provide greater access all the way to complete un-vetted write access. I don't think we'll be any different to other OSS projects.
But we are in control of our official Xara branded tree - doesn't stop anyone building their own version with their own additions - just as, presumably, anyone can take Inkscape and do the same (you did it to Sodipodi didn't you?). It's GPL - people have the freedom to do what they want with our code.
Well, I'd say that we could steal code from them, but it is unlikely that they'd want ours -- for the simple reason that it seems they need
copyright assignment.
No we do not want copyright assignment. We think that's unfair as it take rights away from the author. More details on our FAQ under the licensing section, which has been updated recently. http://www.xaraxtreme.org/faqs.html
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 don't think even most current developers could claim copyright to large sections on Inkscape. I wouldn't even want to try and figure out all the copyright issues in Inkscape.
Ah well that could be a more serious issue. We can't, any more than anyone can really, accept contributions if the copyright is not clear. Too dangerous.
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.
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.
So why doesn't someone do a sort of Ultra-draw wrapper super-API library thing that we can both use. i.e. it provide one super-set rendering API that itself calls down to XaraDraw, Cairo, Quartz depending on user or program preferences. And then we'd both use this ultra-draw and both gain the desired benefits. Quartz, Cairo and XaraDraw are similar enough to make this not too huge a job I would guess.
And perhaps that's the type of approach that could be used going forward. Eric's Uber-converter is a similar thing. We both get to benefit from that.
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?
The bigger picture is that Adobe just bought Macromedia because they are concerned, rightly, that Microsoft are going after them. So they combine number 1 and 2 to stand a better chance against Microsoft. Meanwhile if we're not careful Xara / Inkscape are like two little ants spending their tiny resources competing against each other - irrelevant and insignificant to Adobe / Microsoft *and* the majority of potential users out there.
I sort of would hope combining that benefits and efficiencies of "the open-source way", with the best of what you've got and the best of what we've got and then we might be a credible realistic alternative to the big-guys. And that's not just the Linux market but the much wider market. Oh and while vector drawing might have been regarded as relatively niche in the past I don't think it should be. The whole world is moving to be vector based (all three operating systems are on the verge of using vector based UIs). Personally I don't believe there should be such a separate, and artificial separation between bitmap and vector graphics programs.
Vector graphics should be the prime, first class citizen, of computer graphics. It should be the first graphics program that people buy and want to use. Rich vector graphics is inherently more powerful and flexible. Just think about the scriptable opportunities in this space. (Our Webstyle template based product takes this approach. It takes professionally designed vector template graphics and allows dummy-users (i.e. those with little design skill - and that includes me and most that I know) to customize the graphics, colors, wording, scale and in a vector way. It's perfect for creating vector UI components, such as buttons, icons etc. A hugely powerful concepts that opens Vector graphics benefits for the rest of us. We're only touching the surface on that side.
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 suppose I'd sum it up that the result should / could be greater than the sum of the parts. That way we could all benefit, the open-source way benefits, Linux benefits because it can more readily offer mass-market and professional graphics solutions to Windows users. We all benefit because there are simply more developer bodies working for the same gaols of creating better graphics software.
Charles
On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 07:55:19PM +0100, Charles Moir wrote:
I think we have one or two devs lurking here, maybe others. Neil Howe, our CTO, Phil Martin our chief techy on Xara and responsible for most of the architectural stuff. Gerry and Like may also be lurking, and appear from time to time.
But as Bruce says changing a company culture to be open in way you guys are is difficult. We all have to be careful because we represent a commercial company that can get sued, and because we have paying customers.
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. :-)
Bryce
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
On Fri, 2005-10-14 at 13:26 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
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.
Hi Charles...if you or any other xara devs. have questions about the Create Project, you can ask me or join the create mailing list from the URL above.
Also, it would be good to dicsuss integration with Open Clip Art Library in the near future...its time to build up our community, right!
Also, if you have any questions or interest in having a conference call about working with Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org), I'm your connection on that as well.
Jon
On 10/14/05, Charles Moir <CharlesM@...1042...> wrote:
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?
Exactly. And the most frustrating thing is that this duplication results not from differences in approach (they seem to be relatively insignificant), not from unwillingness of the participants, and not from some legal issues. The only reason is technical. If it were _technically_ easy to combine the best from the two programs tomorrow, I think everyone would be happy to proceed with that.
So I think in the end, we'll end up sort-of-merged, but more likely this merge will consist in one program sucking in all the good bits from the other more quickly and vigorously than vice versa, and thereby winning. Which way will it go? I can't say, and nobody can say at this time. Let's try and see.
Working on shared libs is a good thing. However, for me personally the most important thing is the UI. I added a lot of small and not-so-small UI tweaks to Inkscape, and even though a few years ago I was a diehard Xara fan, now I perceive Xara as somewhat clumsy compared to Inkscape. It feels a bit awkward when I use it, I miss lots of small conveniences of Inkscape. Also Xara misses a few critical features of Inkscape, most importantly clones. And of course, Inkscape also misses a lot of features Xara has. So for me, it's very important to watch how the initial inflows of borrowings will proceed in both directions, what will be taken and what ignored. That will make it more clear as to which is the most realistic path towards the "grand unification" in the long term.
Vector graphics should be the prime, first class citizen, of computer graphics. It should be the first graphics program that people buy and want to use. Rich vector graphics is inherently more powerful and flexible.
Excactly my thoughts. I've been saying this for years. It makes me cringe every time a newbie equates "computer graphics" or even "design" with Photoshop or Gimp. Hey, Photoshop is just for for photos, look at its name! :)
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.
It's up to you, but I'm not sure resisting to improvements, even temporarily, is the best tactic. Everyone can try the complete Xara on Windows right now, and everyone can get a good idea of what's in most urgent need for improvement, based on that.
I suppose I'd sum it up that the result should / could be greater than the sum of the parts.
Exactly. If only because the parts will keep growing while being "summed" at the same time :)
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org
On 10/14/05, Charles Moir <CharlesM@...1042...> wrote:
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?
Exactly. And the most frustrating thing is that this duplication results not from differences in approach (they seem to be relatively insignificant), not from unwillingness of the participants, and not from some legal issues. The only reason is technical. If it were _technically_ easy to combine the best from the two programs tomorrow, I think everyone would be happy to proceed with that.
So I think in the end, we'll end up sort-of-merged, but more likely this merge will consist in one program sucking in all the good bits from the other more quickly and vigorously than vice versa, and thereby winning. Which way will it go? I can't say, and nobody can say at this time. Let's try and see.
Working on shared libs is a good thing. However, for me personally the most important thing is the UI. I added a lot of small and not-so-small UI tweaks to Inkscape, and even though a few years ago I was a diehard Xara fan, now I perceive Xara as somewhat clumsy compared to Inkscape. It feels a bit awkward when I use it, I miss lots of small conveniences of Inkscape. Also Xara misses a few critical features of Inkscape, most importantly clones. And of course, Inkscape also misses a lot of features Xara has. So for me, it's very important to watch how the initial inflows of borrowings will proceed in both directions, what will be taken and what ignored. That will make it more clear as to which is the most realistic path towards the "grand unification" in the long term.
Vector graphics should be the prime, first class citizen, of computer graphics. It should be the first graphics program that people buy and want to use. Rich vector graphics is inherently more powerful and flexible.
Excactly my thoughts. I've been saying this for years. It makes me cringe every time a newbie equates "computer graphics" or even "design" with Photoshop or Gimp. Hey, Photoshop is just for for photos, look at its name! :)
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.
It's up to you, but I'm not sure resisting to improvements, even temporarily, is the best tactic. Everyone can try the complete Xara on Windows right now, and everyone can get a good idea of what's in most urgent need for improvement, based on that.
I suppose I'd sum it up that the result should / could be greater than the sum of the parts.
Exactly. If only because the parts will keep growing while being "summed" at the same time :)
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org
On 10/14/05, Charles Moir <CharlesM@...1042...> wrote:
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?
Exactly. And the most frustrating thing is that this duplication results not from differences in approach (they seem to be relatively insignificant), not from unwillingness of the participants, and not from some legal issues. The only reason is technical. If it were _technically_ easy to combine the best from the two programs tomorrow, I think everyone would be happy to proceed with that.
So I think in the end, we'll end up sort-of-merged, but more likely this merge will consist in one program sucking in all the good bits from the other more quickly and vigorously than vice versa, and thereby winning. Which way will it go? I can't say, and nobody can say at this time. Let's try and see.
Working on shared libs is a good thing. However, for me personally the most important thing is the UI. I added a lot of small and not-so-small UI tweaks to Inkscape, and even though a few years ago I was a diehard Xara fan, now I perceive Xara as somewhat clumsy compared to Inkscape. It feels a bit awkward when I use it, I miss lots of small conveniences of Inkscape. Also Xara misses a few critical features of Inkscape, most importantly clones. And of course, Inkscape also misses a lot of features Xara has. So for me, it's very important to watch how the initial inflows of borrowings will proceed in both directions, what will be taken and what ignored. That will make it more clear as to which is the most realistic path towards the "grand unification" in the long term.
Vector graphics should be the prime, first class citizen, of computer graphics. It should be the first graphics program that people buy and want to use. Rich vector graphics is inherently more powerful and flexible.
Excactly my thoughts. I've been saying this for years. It makes me cringe every time a newbie equates "computer graphics" or even "design" with Photoshop or Gimp. Hey, Photoshop is just for for photos, look at its name! :)
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.
It's up to you, but I'm not sure resisting to improvements, even temporarily, is the best tactic. Everyone can try the complete Xara on Windows right now, and everyone can get a good idea of what's in most urgent need for improvement, based on that.
I suppose I'd sum it up that the result should / could be greater than the sum of the parts.
Exactly. If only because the parts will keep growing while being "summed" at the same time :)
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org
On 10/14/05, Charles Moir <CharlesM@...1042...> wrote:
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?
Exactly. And the most frustrating thing is that this duplication results not from differences in approach (they seem to be relatively insignificant), not from unwillingness of the participants, and not from some legal issues. The only reason is technical. If it were _technically_ easy to combine the best from the two programs tomorrow, I think everyone would be happy to proceed with that.
So I think in the end, we'll end up sort-of-merged, but more likely this merge will consist in one program sucking in all the good bits from the other more quickly and vigorously than vice versa, and thereby winning. Which way will it go? I can't say, and nobody can say at this time. Let's try and see.
Working on shared libs is a good thing. However, for me personally the most important thing is the UI. I added a lot of small and not-so-small UI tweaks to Inkscape, and even though a few years ago I was a diehard Xara fan, now I perceive Xara as somewhat clumsy compared to Inkscape. It feels a bit awkward when I use it, I miss lots of small conveniences of Inkscape. Also Xara misses a few critical features of Inkscape, most importantly clones. And of course, Inkscape also misses a lot of features Xara has. So for me, it's very important to watch how the initial inflows of borrowings will proceed in both directions, what will be taken and what ignored. That will make it more clear as to which is the most realistic path towards the "grand unification" in the long term.
Vector graphics should be the prime, first class citizen, of computer graphics. It should be the first graphics program that people buy and want to use. Rich vector graphics is inherently more powerful and flexible.
Excactly my thoughts. I've been saying this for years. It makes me cringe every time a newbie equates "computer graphics" or even "design" with Photoshop or Gimp. Hey, Photoshop is just for for photos, look at its name! :)
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.
It's up to you, but I'm not sure resisting to improvements, even temporarily, is the best tactic. Everyone can try the complete Xara on Windows right now, and everyone can get a good idea of what's in most urgent need for improvement, based on that.
I suppose I'd sum it up that the result should / could be greater than the sum of the parts.
Exactly. If only because the parts will keep growing while being "summed" at the same time :)
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org
On 10/14/05, Charles Moir <CharlesM@...1042...> wrote:
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?
Exactly. And the most frustrating thing is that this duplication results not from differences in approach (they seem to be relatively insignificant), not from unwillingness of the participants, and not from some legal issues. The only reason is technical. If it were _technically_ easy to combine the best from the two programs tomorrow, I think everyone would be happy to proceed with that.
So I think in the end, we'll end up sort-of-merged, but more likely this merge will consist in one program sucking in all the good bits from the other more quickly and vigorously than vice versa, and thereby winning. Which way will it go? I can't say, and nobody can say at this time. Let's try and see.
Working on shared libs is a good thing. However, for me personally the most important thing is the UI. I added a lot of small and not-so-small UI tweaks to Inkscape, and even though a few years ago I was a diehard Xara fan, now I perceive Xara as somewhat clumsy compared to Inkscape. It feels a bit awkward when I use it, I miss lots of small conveniences of Inkscape. Also Xara misses a few critical features of Inkscape, most importantly clones. And of course, Inkscape also misses a lot of features Xara has. So for me, it's very important to watch how the initial inflows of borrowings will proceed in both directions, what will be taken and what ignored. That will make it more clear as to which is the most realistic path towards the "grand unification" in the long term.
Vector graphics should be the prime, first class citizen, of computer graphics. It should be the first graphics program that people buy and want to use. Rich vector graphics is inherently more powerful and flexible.
Excactly my thoughts. I've been saying this for years. It makes me cringe every time a newbie equates "computer graphics" or even "design" with Photoshop or Gimp. Hey, Photoshop is just for for photos, look at its name! :)
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.
It's up to you, but I'm not sure resisting to improvements, even temporarily, is the best tactic. Everyone can try the complete Xara on Windows right now, and everyone can get a good idea of what's in most urgent need for improvement, based on that.
I suppose I'd sum it up that the result should / could be greater than the sum of the parts.
Exactly. If only because the parts will keep growing while being "summed" at the same time :)
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org
On Fri, 2005-10-14 at 19:55 +0100, Charles Moir wrote:
I don't think even most current developers could claim copyright to large sections on Inkscape. I wouldn't even want to try and figure out all the copyright issues in Inkscape.
Ah well that could be a more serious issue. We can't, any more than anyone can really, accept contributions if the copyright is not clear. Too dangerous.
The copyright situation isn't unclear in the sense that we don't have an audit trail of who contributed what in CVS, but it is icky in the sense that most files are a mixture of work by, say, eight or nine individual contributors.
Especially given we don't have current contact information for all of them, and one of the most significant authors is openly hostile to Inkscape, I don't think (for most parts of the Inkscape codebase) any sort of relicensing or dual-licensing of Inkscape code would be possible.
What Bryce meant is that, in the absence of unanimous developer consent, in most cases it would be impossible to usefully extract the work of only the consenting developers.
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.
Yes... I think the key is to focus on developing and improving a common substrate on which Xara and Inkscape both build (and contribute to). Trading code horizontally between the two apps directly is probably not a viable model.
Along those lines...
So why doesn't someone do a sort of Ultra-draw wrapper super-API library thing that we can both use. i.e. it provide one super-set rendering API that itself calls down to XaraDraw, Cairo, Quartz depending on user or program preferences. And then we'd both use this ultra-draw and both gain the desired benefits. Quartz, Cairo and XaraDraw are similar enough to make this not too huge a job I would guess.
I would be reluctant to introduce yet another new API. I've been peripherally involved in the Cairo effort, and have learned that good API design is VERY hard in this area.
However, I suspect XaraDraw doesn't owe its speed so much to the specific rasterization backend as to a "retained-mode" layer which can do caching and optimization of drawing calls?
Cairo pretty much only does rasterization; it provides no retained-mode layer of its own. Inkscape has a retained-mode layer, but it is extremely dumb, and asks the rasterization backend do much more work than it needs to. It's also worth noting that (if I remember correctly) a quartz backend for Cairo exists, used by the OS X port of GTK.
My own feeling is that it would be most beneficial to take Xara's retained-mode layer, target it to Cairo, and then write a new Cairo backend using XaraDraw's lower-level layers (in the long-term, we would also want to investigate merging what we could of the "XaraDraw" Cairo backend into Cairo's normal software backend, assuming you folks were comfortable with relicensing those bits accordingly).
In case Cairo's generic API proved insufficiently rich for everything required by Xara, note that Cairo does allow for backend-specific API extensions. We could simply employ those in the short-term, and it is likely that many could be incorporated into the generic API over time.
Both Inkscape and Xara could then use Xara's retained-mode layer, and both could use Cairo underneath while still taking advantage of Xara's optimized rasterization routines. In the long run all Cairo-based applications (e.g. all GTK and wxGTK applications) would potentially benefit, and Xara could benefit from future third-party improvements to Cairo directly.
That approach would let us stick with two already well-refined APIs, and take advantage of the principle that a rising tide lifts all boats.
-mental
sorry for multiple copies of my message - gmail is misbehaving today...
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org
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
participants (6)
-
Bryce Harrington -
bulia byak -
Charles Moir -
Jon Phillips -
MenTaLguY -
Ted Gould