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Happy Birthday Inkscape

Submitted by horkana on Sun, 2004-10-31 15:15. Inkscape
Inkscape

This week Inkscape celebrated it's first Birthday. Congratulations to the Inkscape developers on all the progress they have made. The next release of Inkscape version 0.40 is due out in the next couple of weeks and as always testers are encouraged to help out in any way they can.

From: Bryce Harrington
Happy Birthday Inkscape!
2004-10-27 01:30

Has it only been ONE year?

Yep, today, October 26, 2004 is Inkscape"s first anniversary. This time
last year we registered Inkscape with SourceForge and poured ourselves
into converting it over to C++.

Our first public announcement of the founding of the Inkscape project
occurred a bit over a week later, on Nov 6th, to be followed closely by
our first release to Freshmeat on Nov 10th.

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=3416220&forum_id=3970

It"s been an amazing year with the project. We"ve had five very solid
releases, each a major advancement over the previous. We"ve taken this
project a long way and it is now included in nearly every major
Linux distribution. Tens of thousands of people use Inkscape today!

Most importantly, we"ve succeeded in building a very open and prolific
development team, and have been fortunate in gaining a very supportive
and friendly user community.

For the year to come, I think we can look forward to gaining solutions
to many of the features and issues we"re worrying about right now like
PDF, extensions, Gtkmm, etc. CSS will probably be a major effort, but
one we"ll gain a huge amount of benefit from. I think (hope) we"ll see
expansion of Inkscape"s audience to include technical drawing in a big
way. I"d like to put some effort into building up a healthy donation
system since we already have users asking about that.

I also hope we can continue to expand the size of the development team
and the userbase. We should continue to encourage users to peek under
the hood and fiddle with stuff; I"m hopeful the extensions system will
also provide an easy way for users to get involved. We would also do
well to expand our efforts at demoing and presenting Inkscape at trade
shows and conferences.

Congratulations and thank you to everyone that"s helped us get this far,
and look forward to seeing what Inkscape can achieve in 2005. :-)

Bryce

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Drupal: Lost Comments

Submitted by horkana on Tue, 2004-11-02 13:51.

I think a bunch of comments (whole threads of them) have dissappeared from this story since Sunday.
I would have sworn that Miguel made a comment say that Inkscape "should have been ported to C#"

Perhaps it is something to do with the changeover to Drupal but I deliberately waited until after the changeover to post this story.

This comment?

Submitted by Anonymous George on Tue, 2004-11-02 17:51.

Alan, do you mean this comment on the original story?

Doh!

Submitted by Anonymous George on Wed, 2004-11-03 18:55.

Doh! You're right. I'm losing my marbles.

Oh dear.

- Alan H.

still long way to go ?

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2004-11-01 16:49.

its nice to know that a year is up for Inkscape excellent work we graphi designers would like to see the Emboss and other filters implemented a high priority

emboss and other filters ?

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2004-11-01 22:18.

I dont know about you but this graphic designer thinks there's a long list before that stuff is priority.

inkscape is brilliant. but functionality before filters

Nostalgia

Submitted by horkana on Sun, 2004-10-31 19:15.

Here's a link back to the first GnomeDekstop.org article about Inkscape

Cannot live without Inkscape!

Submitted by horkana on Sun, 2004-10-31 18:29.

Inkscape has done well to become an app you can't live without.
Nice of Eugenia to be so enthusiastic.

My problem with Inkscape... by Anonymous George

For the people who have said

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2004-11-01 17:52.

For the people who have said there was no bad blood read Lauris' comments here:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=7263868

Read it...

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2004-11-01 22:30.

His complaints are all reducible to "I wanted to make money from Sodipodi and Inkscape stole my potential market". Boo Freaken Hoo. Sorry, but I don't see that as something to hold against the inkscape developers.

forking is o.k., but ...

Submitted by Anonymous George on Mon, 2004-11-01 10:06.

I think "forking" is o.k. , if you want to try a new direction for an exsisting project. But personally i hope that both projects will merge someday somehow, because it is a waste of time to implement some parts seperatly. I would like to see a modular concept (maybe different frontends, same backend), because the only differences i see between sodipodi and inkscape is the gui concept and the programming language; there are reasons for both ways. While (IMHO) sodipodi's gui is better for in document editing (for example in abiword) and gimp users, inkscape's gui is better for a standalone app and windows users. From my point of view it is pretty annoying that i cannot choose my favourite gui freely, because one app lacks (backend) features of the other app.

Forking is overrated.

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sun, 2004-10-31 21:03.

Without commenting on giving credit, forking is what happens when you give people software freedom. It isn't to be frowned upon but cherished. People should have the freedom to take any program they wish in a new direction and release the result of their work.

Sodi Podi

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sun, 2004-10-31 18:39.

Sodi Podi was a fork another program. I just fail to see a point to your comment.

Inkscape devs DO credit Sodipodi

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sun, 2004-10-31 18:38.

I joined the Inkscape group after the split, so I do not know what were the reasons for the fork. But I can tell you that the developers always give credit to Sodipodi, and hold Lauris Kaplinski in very high regard. He is obviously a brilliant programmer. There is no enmity at all in this split; it is merely a divergence in goals for the software.

In fact, if you look on the "About" dialog, all of the Sodipodi devs are given credit, too. I know that this sounds self-serving, but I honestly think that Inkscape.org is free from politics, and that it is a pleasant, altruistic project.

Credit to Sodipodi

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sun, 2004-10-31 18:19.

Credit to Sodipodi where it is due, but you do not see any prominant references to Gil on the front page of the Sodipodi website (although it is mentioned in other places just as the Inkscape website mentions Sodipodi).

That the Sodipodi developers allowed things to get bad enough for a fork to be necessary and given the hostility Inkscape encounted from them it is not surprising that they are not more prominantly advertising Sodipodi. That said I get the impression that the Inkscape developers are very grateful for all the work that was done getting Sodipodi to where it was.

Inkscape has clearly explained their reasons for the split in their FAQ. I think the progress that they have made more than justifies the fork.

More details please

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sun, 2004-10-31 18:11.

> I don't like the way the Inkscape people went about forking Sodipodi.

Like what? Flame wars on the mailing list? Trashing the Sodipodi codebase before leaving town?

> Also, I think some more credit should be given as being a sodipodi fork.

I don't know if this is just me but everyone I know who uses Inkscape knows that the history of the project started as a recent fork of Sodipodi. BTW, the very first question in the FAQ for Inkscape describes the start of Inkscape by four Sodipodi developers. That doesn't sound like they are hiding their origins.

> Eg. I would consider it approipiate to have said something on the frontpage.

It would definitely not be appropriate. The front page of _any_ site should brief description of the product suitable for the casual visitor and any recent news. The history lessons and associated politics belong deeper on the site for those so inclined to look at them.

I don't see anything wrong wi

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sun, 2004-10-31 17:52.

I don't see anything wrong with the way inkscape people handled the fork or at least anything different when compared to other forked projects. How many distributions forked from RedHat have mentioned being forks in their front page? Or does the x.org mention that it was forked from xfree?

It's all the same anyway, I presume that many inkscape hackers used to be sodipodi hackers before the fork.

When did the last sodipodi release come out? Seems like inkscape in progressing much faster than it's predecessor. Well I might be biased since I prefered inkscape to sodipodi right from the start.