![]() Gould says that Inkscape’s Windows users don’t expect that they should be able to - or could contribute to - the project in any way. “People who come to Inkscape from Windows see it from the lens of freeware, instead of open source,” he explains. In fact, Gould says that for the Windows users of Inkscape, the very idea of open source may be foreign. “We have a hard time finding contributors on Windows and MacOS,” he admits. Yet the code contributors to Inkscape mostly prefer to run Linux. “The typical users we have are designers,” Gould says, who tend to be running MacOS or Windows. As a project focused on less technical designers, Inkscape lacks the built-in base of potential user-contributors like, say, Wireshark. You also may not be the ultimate consumer of the tool. This could change, Gould explains, as the design firms using Inkscape become larger and make enough money from Inkscape to give them the ability to contribute back.īut today, if you’re writing Inkscape code, you’re doing it as a labor of love. “Nobody is getting paid to work on Inkscape as their day job,” he says. Gould says a lot of Inkscape’s contributors work in free software professionally or are consultants. Unlike other popular open source projects like Linux or Kubernetes, whose developers get paid well to write free software, virtually all Inkscape contributors are unpaid volunteers. This emphasis on inclusion, Gould says, is really what has made Inkscape successful long term. This history is crucial for understanding why Inkscape functions the way it does, and why its community is so insistent on making it so that anyone could contribute and be involved in the project. In fact, Gould says it ended up causing some stress, with the Sodipodi maintainer encouraging them to fork his project.Īnd fork it, they did. ![]() ![]() Gould and a few others initially tried to route pull requests through the Hydra branch of Sodipodi, hoping to give the Sodipodi maintainer highly usable fixes that would make them easier to merge into the Sodipodi main. Someone might submit a patch, for example, and they were stalled while the project maintainer would do a “complete review,” which proved to be more of a “rewrite.” This slowed down development and discouraged contributions. Even so, this didn’t make the decision to fork Sodipodi any easier.Īccording to Gould, he and other developers wanted to contribute to Sodipodi but couldn’t. As mentioned, the Inkscape co-founders forked Sodipodi, which in turn was a fork of the Gill project. Inkscape comes from a fine pedigree of forks. Read More: NodeSource Packages its Commercial Node.js Software for Kubernetes Clusters – InApps Technology 2022īut first, let’s talk about that fork. It turns out this apparent dissonance makes for some interesting dynamics. Why? Because Inkscape was made for designers interested in creating the perfect logo or beautiful art, yet is developed by engineers who may not have the same creative urge. The result has been a hugely popular - and hugely welcoming - community, though hardly a typical one for open source. The Inkscape creators didn’t want to fork Sodipodi, but they wanted to make it so that anyone could contribute or be involved in the project. The problem with Sodipodi, as Gould related in an interview, wasn’t architectural - it was community, or rather, the lack thereof. Gould has a long history in systems engineering, but became well-known in open source circles due to his pioneering design work on the Ubuntu desktop. Take Sodipodi, an open source vector graphics project that Ted Gould and others forked to create Inkscape. In some ways a fork suggests open source is functioning as it should in other ways, it’s a clear indication that an open source project has failed. You can follow him on Twitter freedom to fork may well be the cardinal rule of open source, as open source luminary Brian Behlendorf once asserted, but forking is not an action that gets taken lightly. Matt is a principal at AWS and has been involved in open source and all that it enables (cloud, machine learning, data infrastructure, mobile, etc.) for nearly two decades, working for a variety of open source companies and writing regularly for InfoWorld and TechRepublic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |