Update and news from Charles Moir

[ThomasHoward]

Ahh, so this is why progress has been so slow, seems to me that its Xara that isn't coming to the party regarding Xara LX being open source, the fact that it isn't being open sourced in its entirety will repel many people who would otherwise work on it.

I hope this project using Cairo instead succeeds, because otherwise Xara LX probably wont get very far.

[Avatar]

I hope this project using Cairo instead succeeds, because otherwise Xara LX probably wont get very far.

Any news about this?

I'm really excited to try this version of xara, sure that will get a powerful help from the commuinty

I read that the fork is hosted on Magix servers

[remi]

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

[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?

[remi]

Last news from Charles:

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Charles Moir wrote on Monday, April 09, 2007 10:51 PM:
Right now with no active development of the Xara LX open source base going on, I think talk about cooperation or merging Inkscape / Xara is premature. The lack of active open source development is partly because Xara staff can't, because we're focussed on commercial releases right now, and partly that it needs someone to work on interfacing Cairo in place of CDraw.

We've said we'd help anyone willing to do the Cairo interfacing work and would host the resulting project. We would like to see active development return to the product. But I get the feeling the demand / interest for the Linux version is not great enough to attract open source developers willing to put time into it.

So we're now considering a commercial release, as has been discussed here. This might be a way in which we can pay the developers to spend time continuing on the product.

Charles
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source: XaraXtreme Developer Mailing-List

Both, Xara Ltd. and "the Community" learned some lessons from this project and in my eyes, it's a wise decision to stop it now.

Regards,
Remi

[jbus]

We've said we'd help anyone willing to do the Cairo interfacing work and would host the resulting project. We would like to see active development return to the product. But I get the feeling the demand / interest for the Linux version is not great enough to attract open source developers willing to put time into it.

The problem is that a Cairo implementation is going to be somewhat slower. Cairo doesn't yet have the speed optimizations that would allow it to complete with CDraw. QT would probably be a much better alternative and would likely rival CDraw in speed because of all the optimizations that QT developers have made.

Also, it would be in the interest of whoever decides to fork this project, to just take it and run with it. Forget about allowing Xara to host the project and most definitely rename it to show the community that the developers behind the fork are serious about the success of the project and no longer tied to the company that allowed it to stagnate.

So we're now considering a commercial release, as has been discussed here. This might be a way in which we can pay the developers to spend time continuing on the product.

This would be interesting provided they can produce a stable genuine Linux version (Not running under WINE) that affords users the use of plug-ins, has the ability to export SVG and is released soon enough that other projects such as the quickly evolving inkscape and whatever forks of Xara LX may arise, don't offer us a much better GPL alternative.

[remi]

Forget about allowing Xara to host the project and most definitely rename it to show the community that the developers behind the fork are serious about the success of the project and no longer tied to the company that allowed it to stagnate.

I don't understand, about which developers you're talking. There are no developers...

Remi

[jbus]

I don't understand, about which developers you're talking. There are no developers...

Remi

Yes, that is true at the moment. That has to do with the fact that Xara never really attracted a large number of Linux users/developers, this is in part due to the CDraw issue. But, that doesn't mean that someone won't organize a project based on Xara LX. The Cairo "fork" seems to be more of a proof of concept rather than anything else at this point and I suspect that the main developer of Cairo will have better things to do than to try to fix Xara LX into what it should have been.

Hopefully though, at some point some developer(s) will recognize that Xara LX's interface and work flow had something good going and they will replace CDraw with QT or Cairo (Preferably the faster QT) and enable Gimp plug-ins. If this happens we will have a GPL application that rivals and likely exceeds the performance and capabilities of the commercial version.

[remi]

Ok, I understand: You think positively. But is it more attractive to create a fork and build up a own developing team, instead of being able to ask the Xara developers for some help/hints with the porting to Cairo, QT or whatever?

One of the lessons learned from this project is: Never ever publish your source code under an open license, if you need this code for earning money.

Remi