On Sat, Feb 10, 2007 at 02:17:08PM -0500, jmak wrote:
This also underlines the importance of priorities. Whatever we say about the professional apps, there is one thing they do well. Beyond all the fancy features the basic tools are well thought out and they are polished. And I think this is the area that Inkscape needs to be improved. It make no sense to keep churning out feature after feature until a the basic tools are not polished.
In this context, I would say, Inkscape has good drawing tools, shape tools, but bad text tool, color management tool, and interface and it doesn't have any non-destructive editing feature at all. Until these basics are not brought up to professional level it makes no sense to keep adding additional features, especially if they are low on the priority list. It is not the sheer amount of features that make a program professional.
It would make much sense to make a couple of Inkscape releases just improving on the basics without adding any new features. This is just my idea.
Prioritization of work in Inkscape is achieved not through a top-down mechanism, as it is in proprietary projects, but rather is more driven by the interests of the developers themselves.
This is due to the nature of how our all-volunteer project works. Consider that whereas in commercial software, value derives from the user, who pays some money that allows hiring engineers to make changes the users (in theory) need. In contrast, with projects like Inkscape value derives from the people who contribute to the software directly.
In order to maximize the value gained to Inkscape, we seek to encourage as many contributions as possible. Since many people have a desire to work on features, that is why feature growth tends to get highly prioritized.
I guess the thing to realize is that in open source projects like Inkscape, things are less of a "centrally-planned economy", and more "market driven". So while we do things like the Roadmap to help provide guidance and synchronize things overall, we find it's better to have a strong (if a bit chaotic) market rather than following a plan to the letter.
Thus, the best way to influence priorities of Inkscape is to just get involved and contribute work that nudges us in the direction you think we should go. :-)
In terms of making Inkscape more suitable for the professional user, we are fortunate in already having a huge database of ideas on improvements needed, in our bug and RFE tracker. So right now the biggest thing we need in order to make Inkscape more suitable for professionals is bug fixes.
If you can code (even just a little!) I would strongly urge you to consider helping with bug fixing, especially if you are on OSX or Windows.
If you don't code, you can still help a great deal by reviewing bugs in the bug tracker, try to reproduce them, and gather as much additional information as you can.
Bryce