This is an unfortunate attitude. I disagree thoroughly with many points of contention in the following forward. I do think the best course of action towards this type of negative emotional criticism is to blow past it and focus on the goals (ie, our roadmap--prove the critics wrong).

My initial response was to point by point discuss reply to this on the sodi-list, but I do not agree with that philosophy, as I feel that Inkscape is moving in the totally proper way. The reason we forked is because the codebase was being held up and communication was being routed (basically) through one person's decision-making. While the codebase might be open source, that style of management sounds similar to many top-down closed source projects, and thank God that both codebases are GPL'ed.

FYI Jon

-----Forwarded Message----- From: Tobias Jakobs <tobias.jakobs@...128...> To: Sodipodi sodipodi-list@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Sodipodi-list] Re: Reply To: Sodipodi / *nkscape... Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 21:48:51 +0100

Am Do, den 26.02.2004 schrieb Lauris Kaplinski um 22:44:

Hello!

It was probably complicated story, but I know little about the actual reasoning among the *scape guys. But certain aspects of their immediate behaviour were unacceptable in my opinion.

• Immediately after creating fork, instead of keeping low profile for a while, they started massive advertizing (and vapourware) campaign to draw the attention away from sodipodi to their project. Sodipodi had progressed slowly to the state, where it started to draw more and more attention.

I think that was normal PR and in every News was the sentence "Inkscape is a Sodipodi fork." And that is even PR for Sodipodi. This was not against Sodipodi.

I had personally hoped to start making money working on it,

How?

that is now very much hopeless, as I have no resources to compete.

They will slow down, belief me.

• The for was from the start not so much about technical disagreements,

No technical disagreements? C++ vs. C SVG vs. perhaps something else GTK vs. "gtk is to slow perhaps I will something new"

but about personal egos. Other than small cosmetic changes, *scape is targetting exactly the same audience, development and usage philosophy than sodipodi. So this makes quite clear, why they chose to do total rename, instead of working on 'sodipodi on steroids' or whatever similar thing.

• The main initiator of fork was at the same time working for major OSS promoting organization (OSDL). This gave him instant advantage by having more connections and resources to promote the fork. I also find it quite inappropriate for an employee of OSS promoting organization to 'steal' other people's project.

You haven't lost anything. And it is there right to fork, even if it is just because they don't like the maintainer.

In brief - thay take my (plus several other contributors) 4-year work, branded it as their own, and started 'selling' it as their own. If that is, how free software developments turns out (the ones with more advertizing power always screw independent developers), I see little reason, why we should case about OSS more than from properietary ways.

Advertising is for OSS as important as for proprietary software and it always was. Think about Linux vs. BSD ...

Sorry for ranting... :-(

I can understand you.

...

Do you have any plans to arrange Sodipodi's GUI to something similar to *nkscape's ??? Currently, this is *nkscapes only 'Real' advantage over Sodipodi ( as it improves the workflow considerably ).

I do not know, what you exactly mean by rearranging sodipodi GUI. The medium-term target for us is GIMP-2 GUI with detachable, draggable, dockable toolboxes and dialogs (althoguh without per-window menubar probably).

The Incsape GUI is really bad, you need much more clicks and mouse moves and if you use more than one document it is even worse. I really love the GIMP2 GUI.

MfG Tobias