Sodipodi animosity towards Inkscape
Roy Mathieu wrote about Inkscape and Sodipodi and I feel I should respond. I really don't think you are seeing both sides of this and are taking everything Lauris Kaplinski has said at face value. You also seem to believe the comment

the ones with more advertizing power always screw independent developers

For one thing the Inkscape developers are no less independant than the Sodipodi developers. It is unfair to claim the Inkscape developers have screwed Sodipodi. They have forked Sodipodi exactly as GNU General Public License (GPL) entitles them to do. Inkscape is not in competition with Sodipodi, despite the divergence of the two codebases some patches and fixes are still ported from Sopidpodi to Inkscape. It is wrong to blame Inkscape for giving people what they want and becoming more popular than Sodipodi.
It is not surprising that any project bemoans the existance of a fork because if your project has been forked it makes you look really bad. The developers of the GNU Image Manipulation Program certainly didn't react well to the Cinepaint fork (aka FilmGimp). Look back at the history of software development and learn from the XEmacs fork the success of which Jaime Zawinski puts down to a greater focus on usability and a more inclusive development group. Look at the case of EGCS which surpassed GCC and wen on to become GCC. Although Inkscape has different priorities it is possible that Inkscape might eventually meet all the needs of Sodipodi users by a different route and be able to please almost everyone. Mozilla Firefox is branch with a significant shared codebase so it is a bit much to call it a fork as Wikipedia claims but I mention it anyway because as dedicated user of Mozilla Seamonkey I can understand how some users feel alienated and neglected by a new project and resent the praise being showered on the newcomer, almost like the resentment the older brother had of the Prodigal Son.
A fork means that your project in some way lacked enough flexibility and good management to at least accomodate the possibilities and ideas of others as friendly branch. As with most projects good management that allows developers to get on with thing is more important than one or two really good programmers. On the face of it Sodipodi didn't do anything wrong, but people wanted it to do more.
The Inkscape project is clearly very good at self promotion, and that does jar with the traditional low opinion many developers have of marketing and advertising but irrespective of the hype I think Inkscape really does stand up on it's technical merits. Keep in mind that at the time the comments hostile to Inkscape were made Inkscape had not made as much visible progress as it has now.
I think Inkscape has learned many important lessons from the likes of the Mozilla project. The Inkscape project tries to be inclusive. The Inkscape project properly understand the the maxim release early and release often and puts it into practice by providing nightly builds for various platforms. This makes it much easeir for casual users and developers to get involved in smaller ways and help with testing and provide feedback and help get bugs fixed. I feel that the Inkscape developers have made a hugely significant effort to engage with their users and make it clear that they appreciate all kinds of feedback. The good attitudes of the Inkscape developers has knock on effects and encourages contributors and is reflected back at them when they encourage users to get involved by contributing to projects like OpenClipart.org or by helping to publicise and promote Inkscape. I am promoting Inkscape right now because I like the program and because I like the developers, and if like so many other projects the developers had been dismissive and taken the condescending RTFM attitude I would not be trying to help them any way I can.
The Inkscape developers are very much aware that they would not be where they are today without having the solid base of Sodipodi to build on. I can understand Lauris Kaplinski's disappointment at Sodipodi being forked but you shouldn't hold that against Inkscape.

Luis you weirdo! :P
From what the automatic translation tools tell me arschegeiger, Luis' favourite new word is a very unusual type of violin player. Never underestimate the Germans, it is great how they make up new words for all kinds of things which I suppose is a result of how they build compound words for everything. (The noun should be arschegeige.)

Update
Roy Mathieu responed to my comments (thanks) and I think I read more into his comments that was really there but I am glad I stopped and thought about what he had written.
He suggests the connections Bryce Harrington has to the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) give him an unfair advantage and greater ability to publicise Inkscape. Maybe it has an effect but I'm not convinced Bryce has any more advantage by employed by OSDL than being any other gainfully employed programmer with enough flexibility to work on projects on his own time. Bryce is clearly the project leader, he has a great attitude and does a good job of managing and encouring others which I think has far more effect on the success of Inkscape. Bryce understands the importance of marketing and he has made the effort to write content and made himself avialable to be interviewed but I do not believe that is not something that other smart developers couldn't do.
I would reiterate the points Jaime Zawinski made that usability and inclusiveness make the difference. As a counter example I would point to Cinepaint. Robin Rowe does an excellent job of publicising Cinepaint but although provides a much needed tool to a niche audience it does not seem likely to displace the Gimp in the way Inkscape seems to have displaced Sodipodi. Perhaps they a greater focus on usability is what makes the difference but it might be an unfair comparision as it is harder to change the direction of a long running project with as much momentum as the gimp.
Although Lauris felt that Inkscape has hurt his chances of doing commercial developement on Sodipodi I seriously hope they can develop a plug-in interface and encourage third party commercial development and give that opportunity back to him.