Update and news from Charles Moir

[MEB]

You can't expect developers to volunteer their time and effort on a project that is deliberately being restrained.

I don´t think this is true. As far as i know there isn´t any kind of restrictions except the cdraw being distributed as binary. And that´s something i understand. As things stand now it would be a risk for a commercial software opensource their biggest tecnhologie advantage. But that´s already an old history.

An alternative has been sugested and discussed (the Cairo engine) that will help to overcome the cdraw lib problem. Xara offered their help and server to
support the Cairo integration... So where are the restrictions? Are you expecting that they integrate the new engine do all the code work and then make it available for anyone to use freely, spending their time and resources, when they could be working on their commercial version for wich they receive money?
Why haven´t the community picked the project and help coding the integration of the Cairo engine, and then develop the program from there?

The biggest problem i see here is the license system. Seems that everyone contributing must sign a licence allowing Xara to use the code in their commercial version. But isn´t this the same case as Sun Microsystems and the OpenOffice.org suite?
As far as i know Sun provided the source code that was used by OpenOffice.org as the base for their actual version. And Sun is taking advantage of the developments being made by the open-sorce community to improve their own commercial version of the suite called StarOffice.
Where´s the diference regarding Xara?