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

Am Do, den 26.02.2004 schrieb Lauris Kaplinski um 22:44:
> Hello!
> 
> 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 think that was normal PR and in every News was the sentence "Inkscape
is a Sodipodi fork." And that is even PR for Sodipodi. This was not 
against Sodipodi.

> I had personally hoped to start making money
>   working on it, 

How?

> that is now very much hopeless, as I have
>   no resources to compete.

They will slow down, belief me.

> - The for was from the start not so much about technical
>   disagreements, 

No technical disagreements? 
C++ vs. C
SVG vs. perhaps something else
GTK vs. "gtk is to slow perhaps I will something new"

> 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.
> 
You haven't lost anything. And it is there right to fork, even if it is
just because they don't like the maintainer.

> 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.
> 
Advertising is for OSS as important as for proprietary software and it
always was. Think about Linux vs. BSD ...

> Sorry for ranting... :-(
> 
I can understand you.

> >  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).

The Incsape GUI is really bad, you need much more clicks and mouse moves
and if you use more than one document it is even worse. I really love
the GIMP2 GUI.

MfG Tobias

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