Quote Originally Posted by remi View Post
The only news are, that there is no progress with Xara Xtreme for Linux. It's also not the goal to create a fork. Instead, the work should go into the current code base and Charles said, that Xara Ltd. is willing to support this (the server is the good old www.xaraxtreme.org server). The only problem is, that there are no developers known, who are working on this project.

Regards,
Remi
Unfortunately, I think the Xara developers sealed the fate of this project when they allowed it to stagnate, supposedly to focus on the commercial Windows version. Also, their unwillingness or inability to take advantages of tools/formats available in to Linux users/developers has ruined what could have been an truly awesome open source application.

They could have easily enabled SVG export (Yes, SVG is very important in the OSS world, like it or not.) and they could have made use of gimp plug-ins in the Linux version just like they allow the use of Adobe PS plug-ins on the Windows version. Instead they voluntarily chose to keep this project restrained. I suspect they were worried it could quickly become better than their commercial software if they didn't restrain it. You can't expect developers to volunteer their time and effort on a project that is deliberately being restrained.

In my honest opinion it's not worth it for OSS developers to bother with trying to contribute to this project at this point. There are much more worthy projects to contribute to, like Inkscape, that are actually moving forward and are not being needlessly restrained. At the rate that Inkscape and many other open source projects are developing, I suspect that in a very short period of time, Xara Linux users will have long forgotten about this software and moved on the much greener pastures.