Re: [XaraXtreme-dev] Xara PR

[Martin Wuerthner <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In message <1168011772.3840.14.camel@xxxxxxxx>
          Paul <paulf.johnson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>> An about community support, people know that today Xara Linux is not
>> free source, if the kernel lib is not at least GPL, then it's not
>> free. I understand how hard this decision is for you, but is hard for
>> other people to give their time for a company for free too, instead of
>> giving it to their studies, families... The GPL gives them something
>> in exchange, GPL makes it "their" code too.
> 
> The problem isn't so much this, it's more that Xara was (and still is
> for Win32) a commercial product with the kernel having chunks of code in
> which simply can't be released under GPL (licences, copyrights - it gets
> sticky).

Just for the sake of correctness: We are not talking about the XaraLX 
kernel here, we are talking about the drawing engine GDraw. The kernel 
has been fully open sourced.

And I do not think licences and copyright have been mentioned as being 
the main problem with open sourcing the drawing engine.

Licences and copyright have been mentioned in other contents: Various 
components that are part of the commercial Windows version (e.g., PDF 
import and export) have been licensed from third parties, so these 
cannot be open sourced and they are simply not part of XaraLX. The 
drawing engine, on the other hand, is required and is currently 
included as an object file without source code.

Martin