Re: [XaraXtreme-dev] Ping

["Alex Tarkovsky" <alextarkovsky@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/17/07, Charles Moir <CharlesM@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I think the following is very interesting actually. There's no way Cairo
> is going to be unusably slow. Xara's speed isn't all a result of CDraw
> but the entire architecture is designed for speed, and so that benefit
> applies to whatever rendering library is used.
>
> And of course it tends only to be the really complicated drawings with
> thousands of polygons that really require the speed, so I'd bet that for
> most day to day drawings and graphic jobs Cairo is going to be fine and
> more than usable in Xara Xtreme.


The way you keep talking up Cairo sounds like you're rather keen to
get rid of CDraw. Is this the case? I thought CDraw was "pretty much
perfect".


> And so the sentiment that
> Xara Xtreme is useless without CDraw is plainly just not true.


You're still missing the point about open source developer motivations
I made in the "Cooperating with open source developers" thread. If you
take away CDraw when no viable replacement exists, Xara becomes
useless to most open source developers. The binary blob they're left
with is of limited immediate utility because there's no possibility
for improvements or fixes, and when open source developers are left
unable to scratch an itch like that, most will lost interest in the
project.


> And for someone that knew Cairo or studied the CDraw interface in Xara
> Xtreme this is not really that difficult a job. I would bet who knew
> what they were doing could have something operational in days (obviously
> a lot longer to get it fully functional).


That's the catch. The more you continue to alienate open source
developers with your suspicions, accusations, and misunderstanding of
open source development, the lower your chances become of attracting
an open source developer who'd be willing to hack up a Cairo
replacement for CDraw, for *free*.

Though wouldn't it just be easier to dual-license CDraw and open source it?