Is anyone else annoyed as crap at the XaraXtreme.org web-site.
It's still left up heralding Xara as some hero of the Open Source and linux graphics desgin community for
saps like me to find and get excited about ... only to find out that the
flippin' thing's been abandoned by the company and the last version of the source
is not even made available by them anymore. The SVN isn't even online anymore to my knowledge.

I've been searching everywhere for an uproar from the community about what happened but I can't
seem to find one anywhere. It seems a bit like false advertisement to me for xara to leave that site up
claiming to be giants in the Open Source community which some digging reveals as utter garbage.

The kicker is the source no longer being available through them imo. I wish there was some kind of
legal action that could be taken. Have to admit I was very excited as Xara as a company for a while until I found out
they fought the open source community tooth and nail about the libs needed the software was based around and then
withdrew altogether -AND- pulled all the source offline. Acting like a bunch of greedy spoiled little kids if you ask me...
If I had to use proprietary software I'd pay the full price for Adobe before I'd buy Xara after that garbage
... I am -so- pissed right now...

I'd read that bit about the prospect of future development collaboration between inkscape and xara for some project
all the hype had me designing a new gentoo based design studio (which I suppose I'll continue working on having
wiped my PC already). Too little research too late I guess. Having looked at a lot of the work done in Inkscape I'm not
too disappointed w/ my decision to make a linux workstation but I am still extremely disappointed in Xara for this letdown.

I can understand your frustration with Xara. Have you tried complaining to Xara and/or on their community forums?

heathenx wrote:I can understand your frustration with Xara. Have you tried complaining to Xara and/or on their community forums?

I plan on trying. I have submitted a question via e-mail to make sure the program was officially toast or just temporarily out of commission.
If I could cause a stink I'd definitely try and start a boycott but I doubt anyone would actually stop buying their product just because they
screwed the Open Source people. No one cares enough about principles to do that kind of thing anymore. Or at least that's the impression I get.

A collaborative effort between Xara and Inkscape would have been a dream come true.

I've actually went around trying to feel out if there's any type of legal action that could be taken if indeed they've halted the project.
Because they're certainly singing a lie on their site. If they were threatened with enough bad press or something big enough they might give in and re-open the project... but I dunno that it'd really get very far using negative tactics like that.

Well, I respect your position, but Xara has the right to stop development at any time. Perhaps they are still interested in developing an open-source product but maybe there are some road blocks that we are not aware of. It was my understanding that the "speed" of Xara is something that they guard. I think they were interested in cairo or something and maybe had some trouble. I don't really recall the details.

Xara and Inkscape combining efforts would be nice but I'd rather have Xara developers working for the benefit of Inkscape.

Anyway, please keep us informed of what you dig up.

They certainly have the right to pull their developers off the project and do whatever they want with their web-site... with the exception of falsely advertising a project that's non-existent and falsely glorifying their company. Or at least I would think that is considered false advertisement. I'll definitely post more if I find something out.

Official word is that this is all the fault of a cop orate buyout type situation. Decisions from this company that bought Xara has tasked
the developers with translating to many different languages so that the product may be released in European markets.
In response to my email they've fixed the web-site and the svn for XaraLX. I'll copy and paste the letter here. And this is why corporations suck.

[Marketing #CPN-709983]: Xara Xtreme Linux
1 message
xara support <[removed]> Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 12:09 PM
Reply-To: [removed]
To: [removed]
No, we haven't exactly abandoned the Linux project. Xara was purchased by Magix last year and they are just not very interested in Open Source. They're not set against it and aren't suggesting we cancel it, but other priorities have come along inevitably - such as localising the commercial Xtreme so it can be introduced by Magix into new European markets. So our developers are working elsewhere right now and without their input there's very little movement indeed on the open source project, but we're not at the point where we're saying they won't be back.

We haven't intentionally removed access to either the source of svn. HOwever I discoverd that the link to the instructions at http://xaraxtreme.org/Developers/devele ... lding.html was broken - we have now fixed that. Apologies for that, we've had to do a lot of work recently on the site since the server died and we did a joomla upgrade at the time of rebuilding, which broke a lot of links, obviously still not all fixed. Following the instructions there seems to work from here OK, but please get back to me if you still have problems.

Ticket Details
Ticket ID: CPN-709983
Department: Marketing
Priority: Normal
Status: On Hold

not used to being able to post as a guest. The above post is mine.

marked it as yours even if I cant actually assign it to your account

Its sad that the Xara thing went pear shaped when they got bought, not entirely surprising tho.
I cant get too upset with them about it, they are a corporate entity after all, they were under no obligation
to open source it in the first place, and the fact that doing it in way that worked commercially turned out harder than
they expected wasnt a massive surprise to me.

it seems that some effort has been made into resurrecting xaralx, in a new project called xarino
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=959442

the project source is at
http://code.google.com/p/xarino/