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.
Art should tell a story. Don't paint a moment, paint a lifetime.
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.
Bookmarks