Has Xara abandoned Linux?

[Doug]

...ohhhhhhhh... -that- tiny little link, hidden at the bottom of the page...
I missed it completely :-) Thanks for pointing it out, seriously.

Don't know how you missed a fat penguin and a red devil, but whatever!

Cheers

[eobet]

One thing seems certain, though... Xara has abandoned OS X.

Nobody has replied to my question in the single, poor little OS X thread there is in this forum.

[jbus]

There used to be links to xaraxtreme.org on the xara.com site.

I think there are a couple of reasons OSS developers haven't embraced Xtreme on Linux. Probably the main reason is that although Xara has opened a large portion of their codebase a critical component, the rendering engine CDRAW, has not been released under an opensource license yet. They have promised to release CDRAW as OSS but have not given a specific timeline for when this will occur. This has two effects. First it means that Xtreme can not be distributed by many Linux distributions as it is considered to be non-free. As a result the exposure of Linux developers to Xtreme is necessarily limited. The second and probably more important effect is that until Xara releases CDRAW the code that they have released is not terribly useful. A different rendering engine could probably be substituted for CDRAW but then you lose one of Xtreme's main strengths. As a result any time that is spent by outside developers may be time wasted if Xara did decide to abandon the open source version. Combine this with a large and complex codebase that takes a while to learn and there isn't a whole lot of incentive to contribute at the moment.

Another factor may be that Xara, probably rightly, doesn't want to add any new features to Xtreme until they get all of the old features ported over. Porting is pretty boring work and in my, admittedly limited, experience OSS developers love adding new features. Hopefully, this will turn into a strength for Xara after they complete the transition to an open source business model. Volunteer developers can provide innovation and Xara can still pay people to do the necessary but perhaps boring stuff.

Making the cultural transition from a proprietary to an open source company is probably much more difficult than any of the technical hurdles that Xara faces. While they seem to love to surprise their users with new and exciting versions of their software the OSS community will expect more transparency. The OSS community isn't very supportive of projects that are only partially open source.

One encouraging sign for the open source version of Xtreme is that the last commit that was made happened just before the release of the Pro Beta and it added support for some of the new features in the xar file format needed by Pro's new features. Hopefully we will see some more activity on the open source version once they finish squashing bugs in Pro.

jedfrechette,

I completely agree with you on this... The reason OSS developers are not flocking to help with Xara Xtreme development is because there are too many questions about the dedication of Xara to this open source project. This is a big gamble to take for a developer to dedicate his time and effort to a project that could possible be killed off abruptly. It seems like Xara realizes they can benefit greatly from the open source model, but at the same time are scared to commit to it.

Opening part of your source code is a good start, but it's not going to attract a frenzy of volunteer developers if the open part of your code is completely useless without code that is still proprietary.

Personally, I think Xara shouldn't worry too much about keeping the open source version of Xtreme limited to features that exist in the commercial version. That strategy is going to just hold back development on the opensource version and stifle innovation. Instead Xara should embrace open source and work on integrating the best features of Inkscape, Gimp and Xtreme. This would attract developers bigtime.