At 09:59 AM 2/19/2004, Bryce Harrington wrote:

But more importantly I wanted to emphasize that a _strategy_ is needed. For example, with Inkscape our strategy for competing effectively with OO Draw is pretty straightforward. First, we shoot for gaining really good SVG compatibility (OO Draw is weak here, and it seems like SVG is growing to become an extremely important file format in the open source community). Second, we try to make the project very enjoyable to work

And as important as working with the rest of open source is, it's also important to be reasonably compatible with major closed source apps. So if, for example, Illustrator creates slightly broken SVG's (I'm not picking on Illustrator, I'm not entirely sure it will export them, even.) you need to be able to cope with that somehow.