I apologise for the violence of my reaction after seeing the closure of XaraLX forum.

And Risto, Steve, Maya, Ross, Remi, Sledger, Ankhor, Ascerbic (and possibly others before I post), thanks for your sympathy and your reactions. I will not leave Talkgraphics forums ; your friendship convinced me.

In fact I continue to use some commercial software, including XX4 because I am not an ideologist nor a pure theoretician (even if I think that philosophising a bit and putting things in perspective is absolutely indispensable).

However the coincidence between that and the - to my opinion - shocking last message in the xaralx progress thread was explosive for me ! I continue to feel the contents of this message as very offending not only because a lot of assertions inside are hazardous, but also because of its quiet certitude about the sort of "elitism" and the often bad quality of free software.

And Covoxer, if you read this thread, I wouldn't offend you, but your developer's status mentioned under your name give you the power to convince most people of the universal truth of what you are saying. But this kind of power is also a big responsibility and to my sense being so assertive without specifying that you only expressed your personal opinion is not fair.
Now on which kind of informations you build your opinion is another kind of thing. I think in this area even statistics fail to demonstrate anything... and of course statistics could be biased by the position of who did or who read them. But in any case truth requires humility.

Now I would detail my own opinion about what you wrote.

"the usual and predictable failure of the open source scheme"

Ideological or naïve or badly informed ?

"the open source was invented as model of developing software by programmers for programmers"

Wrong because at the origins free programmers were users first (see below)

"programmers tend to develop software that they need or want or like to develop"

Of course if programmers were only programmers and completely isolated from the real life... that could be a big problem.

But most brilliant free software programmers and developers I know have another occupation and they became programmers and developers for the following reasons :

- 1° because the commercial software they use doesn't match their goals and they may not touch and change it ;

- 2° because using only commercial software can limit the free circulation and communication of ideas and knowledge (that was one of the origins of the idea of the GPL) ;

- 3° because at some point commercial software could limit the freedom of expression (which of course is the case when programming is part of this expression).

Free software programmers aren't some kind of Gods. They are human, communicative and accessible persons who share the best they can do. A lot of them are true artists or true scientists, or true "amateurs" in the purest and nicest sense of this word (like amateur gardeners or amateur naturalists who play a so important role in the circulation of knowledge) !

"artists prefer XaraLX, programmers prefer Inkscape"

Just an opinion and to my sense a very narrow interpretation of the words "artists" and "programmers" (see above).

"Open source is generally not the best approach at developing software. It lacks the regulating factor. In commercial model the market always balances demand and proposition [....] the most effective regulating factor is a market, and so the demand is best covered with commercial software"

Ideological or naïve, I don't know... But at the lights of today's (and successive) economics crisis one should be very prudent before speaking about "regulating factors"...

"If the demand is represented by the non programming group, it will never be properly fulfilled"

In fact this is exactly the contrary. If I only take today's Inkscape development, bug correction and addition of new features asked by the "non programming" users are extremely fast.
And I must add that if the "Dear Xara" section of Talkgraphics forums is very welcome, useful and constructive, it was waited for a long time while this kind of communication has always been the base of free software development. I wouldn't offend anybody at Xara saying that and I am sure they know that.

"While the application software is extremely poor, badly developed and of low quality if present at all, comparing to commercial world"

I don't know what you mean by "quality". Of course if you speak about "Total Look" interfaces in some cases. But otherwise and about richness of functionalities your assertion is mostly wrong.

...

ivan