Ja ik spreek Nederlands.

Don't get me wrong, I've had years of fun with Xara as well, still do, and will continue to use Xara Designer for a long long time as far as I'm concerned. That will not change.

I've had years of fun with Photoshop as well, and still do (with CS 5.1). Doesn't mean I have to accept it when things get worse, or won't complain about it. Adobe has lost me as a customer, I don't care what features they add, their behavior is unacceptable. Once we agree to new terms/licenses/policies that are worse for us we are stuck with them, they are not going to get better because we have proven that we are ok with them and accept them.

Next year the list of older versions you can upgrade from might shorten, or we will accept that it is OK to have always-on-DRM installed, or being forced to use a dongle, or having some Cloud based features you have to pay for in order to use the software. Before you know it you find yourself rationalizing that a subscription model isn't such a bad deal after all. This is a bit of a stretch at the moment... but Xara has never as far as I know changed this policy until now. It takes just small steps at a time, this just feels like step 1 in Magix plan for Xara's future. "Let's see if we can get away with it and try some more next year."

Compared to what Mudhut is doing almost every software company out there is doing a good job. So Relatively this change in upgrade policy is not so bad if we compare it to them. However, this also works the other way around. Let's take Zbrush as an example, or the Topazlabs plugins, or FL Studio.

I see software companies advertising that with them you still get a perpetual license version, which is basically saying nothing has changed. What they don't advertise is that their policies ARE now worse than what they offered before. Adobe is letting everyone else out there know it is OK to squeeze more out of customers while giving them less in return. This is not giving me a reason to upgrade just for the sake of supporting Xara, it works both ways.