Thursday, June 4, 2009

What's the first step?

I have been asking myself this question for a while now.
And the only thing I can think of is.. that we have to get a plan together, as to how we are going to go about getting this matter out to the masses?
Part of the process, is going to be the need to have a solid, and factual history of the original project for people to read up on, and know the current state of XaraLX.

I have been in touch with both Charles Moir, the founder of Xara.. and Carl Worth, the creator of Cairo.
Charle's opinion is, that it would most likely be more realistic to try to get work moving again on the existing code for XaraLX, mainly getting it to work with Cairo.
There is a Linux developer, associated with Charles / Xara who is willing to do some work, only if it involves working in Cairo to make the project completely open-source. Which is fully understandable.
Carl Worth, said, his original offer, to provide tech assistance to any devs working on porting Cairo into XaraLX still stands.

This is all good news. It is good news, because it shows that the dream of reviving this project has some reality and potential tied to it from the start.
We have a few XaraLX users / fans, who would really love to see the project moved back into the "active" domain... and 3 major players who are willing to, and wanting to see it happen.
Only thing left to do, is to find as many users as we can who feel the same, and hopefully, along the way attract enough attention, to get some serious Linux developers interested.. and see that the project is actually worth while.

Some people will argue, that we already have Inkscape. But the way I see it... Yes, we have Inkscape, and it is great... but, it is also nice to have an alternative and/or additional choice.
XaraLX has some features, which Inkscape does not... and vice-versa. Linux, is about choice.. and supporting projects and applications which are striving to become a valuable addition to the open-source world. So, it would not make sense for anyone to sit there, and do anything in their power to attempt to shut the project down. When this happens, they are basically trying to shut down the entire theory behind "open-source" and "community"

The story behind the CDraw rendering engine, is long behind us. It's time to move forward, and work at bringing XaraLX into the open-source community, as a valuable, and useful addition to the community. It is time... to show what "open-source" is really all about... and not help those, who would try to show the world that Linux is a negative and hostile environment, full of people who just want everything for free.

No comments:

Post a Comment