Sodipodi started as a fork of Gill (abbreviated from "GNOME" and "illustration"),[1] a vector-graphics program written by Raph Levien.

[5] The primary design goal of Sodipodi was to produce a usable vector graphics editor, and a drawing tool for artists.

Even though there are no new releases since 2004,[6] Lauris Kaplinski continued development of Sodipodi for years in a minor way, mostly contributing code refactoring and bug fixes.

[7] Sodipodi started a collection of SVG clip art containing symbols and flags from around the world.

[10] The initial idea was to create a separate Sodipodi Hydra (hydra-oct) branch,[11] planned to be merged into trunk, but as it was difficult to make such a merge developers later decided to create an independent fork and named it Inkscape.