Re: Reply To: Sodipodi / *nkscape...

Hello!

[email protected] kirjutas N, 26.02.2004 kell 14:42:
>  When you say 'Hostile', do you mean that *nkscape did
>  not contact you before creating their Sodipodi fork ???

It was probably complicated story, but I know little about
the actual reasoning among the *scape guys. But certain aspects
of their immediate behaviour were unacceptable in my opinion.
- Immediately after creating fork, instead of keeping low
  profile for a while, they started massive advertizing
  (and vapourware) campaign to draw the attention away from
  sodipodi to their project. Sodipodi had progressed slowly
  to the state, where it started to draw more and more
  attention. I had personally hoped to start making money
  working on it, that is now very much hopeless, as I have
  no resources to compete.
- The for was from the start not so much about technical
  disagreements, but about personal egos. Other than small
  cosmetic changes, *scape is targetting exactly the same
  audience, development and usage philosophy than sodipodi.
  So this makes quite clear, why they chose to do total
  rename, instead of working on 'sodipodi on steroids' or
  whatever similar thing.
- The main initiator of fork was at the same time working
  for major OSS promoting organization (OSDL). This gave
  him instant advantage by having more connections and
  resources to promote the fork. I also find it quite
  inappropriate for an employee of OSS promoting organization
  to 'steal' other people's project.

In brief - thay take my (plus several other contributors)
4-year work, branded it as their own, and started 'selling'
it as their own. If that is, how free software developments
turns out (the ones with more advertizing power always screw
independent developers), I see little reason, why we should
case about OSS more than from properietary ways.

Sorry for ranting... :-(

>  On a side note...

>  Do you have any plans to arrange Sodipodi's GUI to
>  something similar to *nkscape's ???
>  Currently, this is *nkscapes only 'Real' advantage over
>  Sodipodi ( as it improves the workflow considerably ).

I do not know, what you exactly mean by rearranging sodipodi
GUI. The medium-term target for us is GIMP-2 GUI with detachable,
draggable, dockable toolboxes and dialogs (althoguh without
per-window menubar probably).

Best wishes,
Lauris Kaplinski




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