Re: XMI (and Kivio and GPL and Java)

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Thursday, 19 September '02, James Michael DuPont wrote:
> Alan, 
> I see we disagree, I dont have the time to answer all of your points,
> but have tried to make a positive contribution.
[...]
>> As a commercial software project selling stencils does not seem like
>> an
>> ideal source of revenue, and i hope after reading the rest of this
>> you
>> will understand why exactly i think so.  A smarter revenue stream in
>> my
>> opinion would be to charge for Import and especially export to
>> proprietary
>> formats such as PDF, Rational Rose, or much harder Visio.  (writing
>> something like libvisio would be a hell of a challenge but if
>> correctly
>> managed could actually be quite profitable).
> 
> I am sure we are interested in making free software as good as
> possible.
> not making the Kompany rich.

Interoperability is an important part of being 'as good as possible'.  It's
not like we don't want import/export for Visio files just because Microsoft
makes money off Visio.  Having more import/export options improves our
program, not theirs.  The real question is whether anybody cares enough
about the Kivio files to make import/export plugins.  I certainly don't.

[...]
> I have looking into the pdf2html lib if you want to have a pdf import,
> and have figured out most of the drawing code.

That sounds interesting!  Exporting PDF would be wonderful, since neither
Macs nor PCs understand PS by default.  Do you think you're learning enough
PDF to be able to do that?

How are you considering importing PDF?  As something similar to images, or
decomposed into native Dia lines, text etc?

> The rational rose can be done via XMI.
> 
> Visio is another story, and the result should be free.

Way other story, and way old.  Though it should be possible with XSLT now,
for Visio2002 files.  The spec is out there.

[...]

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| Hårdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?