I’m a Windows user, so why do I care?

[Charles Moir]

If you’re wondering why, as a Windows user, these announcements help you? It helps big time. I’ll paraphrase from the FAQ on that website.

1) It guarantees Xara X has a future.
Once the code is made Open Source, it means no commercial company can wholly own. It means you as customers are no longer dependent solely on us developing it. It means that what has happened to Expression on the Mac and looks increasingly likely to happen to Macromedia Freehand (purchased by competitors and development stopped) can never happen to Xara X. It provides a degree of security for the product that you will not get from a closed-source product, be it from a small company or large (e.g. Macromedia) . We know there has been resistance from larger buys who will not buy from smaller companies. Well we can now give them more re-assurance about the longevity of the product than you’d get even from a Microsoft or Adobe / Macromedia.

We fully intend to continue to provide tight quality control over the official and commercial versions, as we have the past. Our commercial versions will be as stable and reliable as ever (and we believe considerably better than our competitors).

2) It should accelerate development
By far the most common request on the Xara X forums is for new or improved features. We maintain a ‘wish list' that contains hundreds of great ideas. If we could implement only a fraction of these we'd have unequivocally the best all-round graphics product, period (well we believe it’s already the best all-round product, but we all know ways in which it can be made better). But we don't have the financial resources compared to, say, Adobe or Microsoft. This is incredibly frustrating for our users, and even more for us.

Then compare the rate at which successful Open Source projects develop - far faster than we can. And usually by developers just providing their efforts free of charge. These products evolve as a community project because they want a good ‘whatever’ program on their platform. The bigger projects often have many dozen developers, sometimes hundreds of contributors. That is how they compete against the likes of Microsoft.

So imagine what could be done by combining that type of community development resource along with the commercial backing and investment of Xara into the project, our quality control and software design experience. We hope to massively leverage what we're doing already, that helps the Linux community get what they want (a really slick, rapidly evolving, competitive, commercial standard product) and this should help the product evolve much more rapidly. We believe that by combining both approaches this can be a very credible threat to the two giants that dominate this industry - Adobe and Microsoft.

3) It gives users choice
Not just a choice of platform. The goal is to have near identical versions running on Windows, Mac and Linux. We know many users of Xara Xtreme are reluctant Windows users because we gave them no choice. Well hopefully now we can give them that additional choice to work on their preferred platform, Linux or Mac.

It might also provide choice as to variants of Xara Xtreme. If there is demand from a section of the user community for, say, a CAD orientated version, or a DTP orientated version, then users and developers have the freedom and choice to create such things themselves. And this happens regularly in the Open Source world.

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Our goal is simply to establish Xara Xtreme as an industry standard. We need to get hundreds of thousands of users, millions even. More users means more support across the board. More books, more websites, more art, more third party extensions and add-ons. Part of strategy has to be to make it cross platform. Part of it is to make the huge price cuts we have in order to bring the product to a much wider audience. “The bang to buck ratio is huge’ to quote someone else talking about Xara Xtreme.

What does it mean for Xara the company? Believe me we wouldn’t have taken these steps unless we were confident that this is the best way to ensure the longer term survival and indeed prosperity of the company and the product.

So how does this help the Windows version? Because there will now be one common code-base across all three platforms. Features added, fixed and improved for one platform appear in all of them.

[Xhris]

...Features added, fixed and improved for one platform appear in all of them.

This was what I was expecting to hear (assuming that it means features made by the open source community get ported to the commercial windows version).

What you have done is very clever and impressive.

I have to say, after a thorough thinking of the decision made, it is a very novel way of tackling the giants Adobe and Microsoft. I am impressed by your philosophy, forward thinking, and entrepreneurialism.

[AntonM]

This is obviously good news for Xara users and, as Charles says, Xara Ltd wouldn't have taken the step if it didn't support the company's survival.

Now, I'm not at all an expert on all the implications of Open Source, and I'd love to read a nice, simple explanation of it. My current and likely highly flawed understanding of it is that the the source code is made public (=given away for nowt) and lots of code whizz kids get stuck in and add cool bits to it -- something like FireFox, which has an enviable reputation.

That leads me on to my next point of befuddlement: FireFox is free. I'm not angling for free Xara, but I do want to understand how Xara Ltd is going to persuade people to give it the money it needs to thrive as a business entity.

Finally, people whom I've told about this new development have said, "Okay, so... they've offered you an upgrade at twenty-odd quid, and they're going open source... so why should you buy the upgrade when it's going to be free like FireFox?" I don't have the answer to that (except that I'm quite happy to give money to people who do good work). What is the correct answer?

[BobInce]

Whoah.

[explodes]

Well OK. I said I wanted the 'announcement' to be something that would create popularity for Xara and help those poor Illustrator users out of their rut. This is it in spades, much more than I suspected.

This is great for me - I can't wait to get my code in to make path intersections happen accurately. I really, really, hope the strategy works for Xara the company too. It's a risky strategy but you all deserve success.

Thank you!

edit: anyone submitted this to slashdot yet?

[akubbeng]

YYESS!!

That's what I was hoping for. What a superb, realistic, self-confident, daring move! Let's show all 3 platforms (Linux, Mac and Windows) what we are capable of together.

Really looking forward to coming developments.

Good luck to all of you,

Albert, The Netherlands

[zee]

Just purchased Xara Xtreme. Thanks Xara and good luck with all your future plans.

[bcire68]

Hey! Charles quoted me... He really does read the forum...

Thanks for this post, Charles. This really helped me to understand the how and why of going open sourced.

Before your post, I had my insecurities about the future of Xara, but now I understand that what you are doing is to ensure the future of Xara.

The last thing that I (and others I think) would like to understand, is how you envision the migration of open soursed code to the comercial version working.

Thanks for your time and (especially) efforts.

Eric

[The Alien]

This sounds very good. Of course, if Xara Ltd. believe it's the best move, I won't argue with that

Still, I got the same question as AntonM: every open source software I've seen is free. One can basically download the source code and compile it. Is Xtreme evenatually gonna be free too?

Also I can imagine Xara programmers have done their best to make XaraX easy, but above all, fast. I dunno if this is going to be influenced when you have third party coders adding their own not-so-optimized code to the program.

[Charles Moir]

I (and others I think) would like to understand, is how you envision the migration of open soursed code to the commercial version working?

Not quite sure what you mean by 'how'. How technically, or how from a licensing point of view. Well both are covered (if not fully answered) in the FAQ on www.xaraxtreme.org in the Open Source section. There are various established ways it can happen, (and does for many successful Open Source projects that have a commercial side). We'll probably follow one of those established approaches to licensing when the issue arises (not in the short term anyway as it's mostly our code going Open Source).

[tad]

It it true that you "are trapped in a stately home" ???

tad