The article is dead on... there is absolutely no way Xara can expect developers to volunteer time on a project that can easily be pulled from under the developers feet at any moment. That's exactly what the problem is here. By keeping a crucial part of Xara Xtreme under wraps, they are putting doubts in developers minds about the willingness of Xara to continue supporting the project. If Xara were to pull the plug on the project, what would the developers have to show for their work? Nothing. They couldn't fork it without reworking everything and why would anyone want to do that when they could contribute to Inkscape or other projects?

Ultimately Xara wanted developers to volunteer with no guarantees that their work would amount to anything. That's laughable and shows the lack of understanding Xara has for the open source community.

On a side note, Xara could have their way with CDraw as well as save this project and their reputation by having Xara developers start a port of Xara Xtreme based on Cairo or (much faster) QT that is fully open. In any case, it would have to be a serious effort, minus the stagnation and lip service.