Xaralx progress!

[jbus]

CDraw is not the be all and end all of everything... At some point in the near future I'm certain CDraw will be irrelevant, and whatever fork (if any) of Xaralx survives will function just as well if not better than it does now. Either that or Inkscape or possibly some other project will have progressed well beyond it.

Yes, currently Cairo does need a lot more optimizations to speed it up, but it is progressing quickly. Also, QT developers have done some really awesome optimizations that likely rival CDraw in performance. So for now a QT based Xaralx may be the best way around the speed issue if Xaralx Open Source has any chance of progressing any further without a negative impact on performance.

On the topic of Open Source. If you don't understand or appreciate the concept then, it's probably best that just stay away from it. Acting like it's going to destroy the world as we know it is ridiculous. No one forces developers to contribute to open source projects. They do so out of choice and it is that choice along with the openness and collaboration involved that produces some really great software, some of which would likely never be produced under the constraints of a commercial product. As humans we want to share with others, and this natural desire to share is what drives Open Source.

Many corporations and developers are fearful of Open Source, because they fear the competition and they fear losing the ability to lock people into proprietary products and formats because,by and large, that is how many of them make their money... By trapping people into a product or format, rather than by innovating and providing good service. This is why there is such opposition to open source software, everything else is FUD.