Tue 11 Oct 2005
It seems that the company Xara is going to release their Xara Xtreme product under the GPL. What strikes me as really cool about this is that the company has stated in their FAQ that they want to work with Inkscape developers where possible. It is always nice when companies release their code under an OSI license. It is even nicer when they go out of their way to work with the community and not just try to become the dominate player in their selected field (in this case vector drawing tools). Hopefully the projects can feed off of each other and perhaps end up combining their talents to create a great tool for the FOSS desktop.
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October 11th, 2005 at 11:17 pm
Both pieces of software have a healthy future
Inkscapes strengths are its simplicity, extensibility and standardised file format
Xara’s abilities include advanced vector effects and a very fast canvas area
in a perfect world ( and i feel this wll eventuate) Xara will be the ‘adobe after effects or ‘discreete combustion’ of the open source illustration world.
Inkscape will collaborate on their awesome vector transofmation and deformer code and hopefully cairo will benefit from the canvas area drawing code.
when xara gets svg import support , it will effectively be where a user takes their stock to produce once-off enhancements for a particular purpose.
inkscape cannot ever do some of the things built into xara due to the SVG spec and i think that is important so that specialised needs are recognised in workflow rather than accidentally moving users to a non standard file format creating complexity for otherwise simple illustration tasks.
all projects are going to benefit from this move and xaras strengths will shine through to awesomely enhance what is possible with opensource graphic design.
October 12th, 2005 at 4:48 am
I know Xara. I have several friends who worked there years ago. In fact, I live just down the road from Xara’s office.
The big thing about Xara was their rendering core (called GDraw after the guy who wrote it, Gavin) was entirely written in x86 assembler. The gory details can be found in the USENET post below. Now, on the XaraXtreme website, they mention a “CDraw” engine – perhaps they have finally ported the x86 code into C. This would be an extremely good thing – you see, GDraw was originally written in ARM assebler and the PC version was hobbled together back in 1993 by using a macro translation tool to translate ARM assembler mnemonics into x86 mnemonics (I kid not!)
If they still use raw x86 in their source the GPL’d version won’t take off.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.acorn/msg/8c89e4d2b2fb2f3c?hl=en&