Releasing CDraw under the GPL likely won't have the disastrous "use
> elsewhere" consequences you are imagining.
>
> I have to speculate here a bit, because I don't know exactly what
> the disastrous consequences are that you imagine. Is it that CDraw
> might get sucked into cairo, and then applications like inkscape
> could quickly start benefitting from it, and then inkscape might
> take developer mindshare instead of Xara?
>
> First, I'll ignore the fact that inkscape is already acknowledged
> as winning that mindshare already, even without any benefit from
> CDraw.
>
> Second, if CDraw were made available under the GPL, then it
> couldn't be immediately used in cairo, (not without cairo changing
> its license from LGPL/MPL to GPL, and that's quite unlikely to
> happen). For example, right now Zack Rusin at Trolltech is doing
> some really interesting things inside Qt with a vector-graphics
> library that's very much like cairo. It's available under the GPL,
> and the cairo community hasn't even looked at the code because of
> that, (in spite of the fact that Zack has recently added some stuff
> that we've been wanting in cairo for a while).
>
> Now, I actually don't love the fact that there's a bunch of
> duplicated effort in the community already between cairo and the
> Qt stuff. But I think the evidence is pretty good that GPL
> libraries do tend to maintain a sort of separate existence.
>
> (Interestingly, GPL applications wouldn't have any problem using
> GPL libraries, so maybe at some point GPL application authors will
> all start collaborating enough on GPL libraries that they start
> dominating, and things like LGPL libraries start disappearing.)
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