Quote Originally Posted by jedfrechette View Post
That is an interesting conclusion. One that I'm sure Industrial Light & Magic, Apple, IBM, Sun, Google, Intel, and numerous others would be interested in hearing. Perhaps another lesson that could be learned is that you won't see significant benefits from an open source development model unless you play by the "rules", i.e. release your code.

It may well be that open source is not commercially viable for Xara, unfortunately, I don't think we will ever know because it was never given a full chance. As it stands now, it looks like Xara will be nothing more than an open source footnote. Unless something changes dramatically, I don't see much incentive for anyone, other than die hard fans, to make significant contributions at this point. That is unfortunate because I would have loved to see Xara be successful. Of course if I were a cynic I might say that getting some free publicity before selling your company is being successful. Not that I'm not saying that, it seems clear to me that Xara did make a genuine effort. I think they just had some fundamental misunderstandings and perhaps unrealistic expectations.

Best,
I agree with Jed... It seems Xara approached this project with distrust and uncertainty from the beginning. Had they approached it with a more optimistic outlook, the project could have been a huge success. Gaining Xara huge market share in the Linux/Unix market and a good reputation amongst OSS developers. Imagine the support contract possibilities as more and more schools, businesses, organizations and governments move away from being Microsoft only shops.

Xara's biggest mistakes:

1. Trying to dictate whether or not Xara LX would be forked. This is a no-no in the open source world. Once you release software under GPL it CAN be forked, like it or not. If you have reservations about this, then open source licensing is not for you or your company. The fact that Xara made it known they didn't want it forked likely set off red flags in many developers minds. Clearly, Xara doesn't understand or appreciate the way OSS development works or they would not have done this.

2. It's both forgivable and understandable that they didn't want to GPL CDraw, but trying to keep the project tied to CDraw and its commercial Windows counterpart was a very bad decision. Sorry, but a healthy open source project is going to diverge from its proprietary counterpart. OSS software usually has different goals and priorities than proprietary software. You can't expect an open source project to thrive under the constraints that exist for proprietary software development. Sadly, Xara could have gained some great feature ideas from this project to incorporate into their commercial Windows software. Unfortunately the project was not given the room it needed to grow.

The best bet at this point to save this project is to turn a new page. Start by renaming and refocusing the project. Drop CDraw altogether, so it's truly GPL and forget what its commercial Windows cousin looks like and does. Set the project on a new course that is unencumbered and we may all be pleasantly surprised by the results.