Update and news from Charles Moir

**fjgaude** · 15 February 2007, 03:18 PM

Personally, Charles Moir's feelings about CDRAW as a binary is valid. Consider what has happened with Novell joining forces with Microsoft, and Ubuntu joining with Linspire: we see a blend of proprietary and open source.

What does it gain us to be pure, pure OSS? The world needs more folks working together to achieve a goal. Everyone has to make a living one way or the other. The folks at Xara Ltd. that did most of the coding to get Linux version to where it is deserve our thanks, even though they were working on salary during the time.

There is nothing like Xara on Linux. I've worked with Inkscape off and on and even with its latest update, Gaussian blur, and it is almost an embarrassment to go from using Xara to Inkscape, because of the loss of speed, quickness, and increase in key strokes and complexity.

So let's give Xara team a big thanks for what they have done so far, and ask others who have the ability to help, to please help, in creating a most worthy design software.

frank

**eobet** · 15 February 2007, 05:34 PM

And again, not a word about the OS X version...

**Soquili** · 15 February 2007, 05:53 PM

I think people are missing the point about Open Source Software. Linux and/or OS X developers other than Xara Group Ltd (now owned by Magix) employees should not be expected to produce all the work.

Developers from the Linux and OS X communities are required for any Open Source program to prosper. Waiting for Xara to dedicate develpers and money is not what Open Source is about.

The fact that Xara Group Ltd was bought by another company is a very good indicator they do not and have not had assets that allow them to devote a lot of time and money they cannot afford.

Charles nor anyone else can say work on OS X or the Linux version can be expected to have a deadline. Reading through the mail lists there have been few OS X developers available or willing to give of their time.

Just my 2 cents (USD) which is worthless for anything today (even a gumball costs 25 cents

).

**StevenWWinters** · 15 February 2007, 08:02 PM

Has Xara ever stated whether source for cdraw will be released? I thought the plan was for it to be, but perhaps that has changed...

**ajdlinux** · 18 February 2007, 02:22 AM

It *is* important to have an open source CDraw because until then Xara is Free Software that depends on non-Free Software. This means, for example, that Xara must be in Debian's non-free repository, rather than 'main'. If CDraw was open sourced there's a much bigger chance that Debian users and users of other 'completely free' distros would install it.

Projects that run on an open source platform (Linux), are open source in themselves (like xara) but depend on a closed library (CDraw) generally aren't all that well received by the community.

If it's such a small deal releasing CDraw as open source then why doesn't Xara just do it? It could get more attention then.

**jedfrechette** · 18 February 2007, 03:27 AM

For an excellent analysis of why Xara's open source strategy isn't working I suggest anyone who is interested read this message by Carl Worth

http://www.xaraxtreme.org/maillists/.../msg00038.html

**remi** · 18 February 2007, 12:49 PM

Charles already mentioned one of the main reason, why CDraw wasn't published up to now: There is no great feedback from "the Community" to develop new features like the completion of the SVG import/export filter. There are only members of "the Community" who asks for CDraw to include this piece of code into other projects like Linux OS or competition projects. There was even a developer who likes to do a port of Xara Xtreme for Linux for the Windows operating system, which is surely not the goal of Xara Ltd. and all the developers who work on this product for their living.

All the great developers of "the Community" wants "CDraw", but there was only one developer who was willing to do some coding for Xara Xtreme for Linux so far (I'm talking about Alex). Perhaps there was one or another two who tries to do a Mac OS X port, but that's all.

Under these circumstances I wouldn't recommend to open the source code of CDraw to all the nice competitors out there, which likes to call themselve "the Community"...

Regards,
Remi