This is one of the best bits of software news I’ve heard in a while - and pretty much entirely unexpected. Xara Xtreme is going open source with Linux and Mac versions licensed under the GPL.

If you haven’t heard of Xara it’s one of the finest vector drawing programs ever. Its roots are in a product called Artworks which ran on Acorn RISC OS machines. The first version of Xara I owned ran snappily on a 486, did real time anti-aliasing and basically knocked spots off anything else. My venerable copy of Xara X is the main reason I boot up a Windows machine these days.

Xara (the company) started out as Computer Concepts and they produced the first piece of software I ever bought - the WordWise wordprocessor for the BBC Micro. Legend has it that Charles Moir wrote it at his mum’s kitchen table. About fifteen years ago my company and Computer Concepts briefly collaborated on a hardware product and, frankly, I can’t wait to have the chance to work with these guys again - they’re an excellent company who have been producing top quality software for twenty five years.

I’m rambling now… Just so excited that not only will I be able to run Xara on my Mac and Linux boxes - I’ll probably be able to help get it there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 12th, 2005 at 1:20 am and is filed under Apple, Linux, Software. 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.