Inkscape 1.0... ETA 2015?

When the Inkscape team put up a news post at the beginning of the month, thanking their Summer of Code interns, I thought that release 0.46 must be coming any time now. With less than a week left in the month, I'm not feeling so confident.

Inkscape 0.45 was released in February with a bugfix release of 0.45.1 released in March. A week from Friday, we'll be at 8 months since 0.45 was released.

If you look at the Inkscape Roadmap, version 1.0 is due out somewhere after version 0.55. If they continue to average 8 months between releases, Inkscape 1.0 will arrive 8 years after 0.45 released, on or about February 5th, 2015, somewhere around 11.25 years after they started.

By the time Inkscape hits its 1.0 release, Adobe will likely be on Creative Suite 9, Suse Linux will be on Version 13, Microsoft will be announcing the end of support for Vista, bargain desktops will be achieving teraflop supercomputing speeds, and your iPod will have room for one billion songs.

But let's not rag on Inkscape too much. Compared to Xara Xtreme, they're downright zippy. The Xara team hasn't released a new stable version since August, 2006. Their last development build was 3 weeks ago, but their homepage actually says "Last Updated ( Monday, 14 August 2006 )". They've exceeded 13 months between releases.

Now, I know the standard answer: "We're dependent on volunteers for most or all of our labor, testing, and funding. If you want things to go faster, then do some programming, do some bug hunting, or donate some money so we can pay people to do it." It's a very valid answer.

Still, 11 years (at this pace) to get to the 1.0 release? Wow.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Techno Thoughts.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.