Quote Originally Posted by remi View Post
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.
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,