Update and news from Charles Moir

[jbus]

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.

[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?