Xara Corp. made the announcement at the recent Libre Graphics meeting held in Lyon, France.
Xara can trace its personal computer software origins back to the early 80s, with the initial release of its Wordwise wordprocessor, followed by the Impression desktop publishing software and graphics products in the '90s for the Acorn RISC computer. Xara Studio, a Windows-based vector illustration application, was marketed by Corel Corp. as CorelXARA in the late 90s, with the rights later reverting to Xara Corp., which went on to release the more advanced Xara X and the recent Xara Xtreme.
And now Xara, which the company claims contains a graphics engine that is "the world's most powerful," has been made open source under the GPL license. Xara's hope is that this will speed development of the application and result in not only a Linux version but one for the Mac, which has never been available, and additionally lead to future Windows releases.
According to Xara CEO Charles Moir, "We intend this product to be a flagship Linux application, bringing graphics capabilities that more than compete with the best available on Windows and the Mac to the Linux platform." It's an audacious move that will bear watching, since this is the first commercial graphics application to go the open source route with the blessing and ongoing involvement of the parent company.
More information, source code download and demo movies of the application are available on the Xara LX site. Graphics.com Editor Chris Dickman has blogged about this topic. |
