Xara acquired by MAGIX

[jedfrechette]

Charles' comments about only 2 versions of Xtreme don't bode well for the open source version. Nonetheless, it would be nice to get a straight answer about its future after the deafening silence of the last couple of months.

I'm trying really hard not to have flashbacks to the acquisition of Canvas by ACD.

Is that what happenned? I thought they had just folded or something.

One version of the sad story goes: Deneba got bought out by ACD who more or less looted the Canvas codebase to improve their lowend products. A couple of minor updates were released as new verisons but as time went by less and less attention, and almost no promotion, was given to Canvas. The most recent version was released in 2005 and there have been essentially no updates or bug fixes since. Just before Christmass you could buy a copy of Canvas or 200 shares of ACD stock for $100. Even as abandonware I think Canvas was the better deal.

[The Alien]

Congrats Charles and the rest of the Xara team!

It's hard to compete with large companies when your company is small. So it's a (strategically) good choice to seek an alliance with the big companies, even though it means the product loses its "Britishness" as it was so well put by others (even I was proud of that and I'm not even British).

I hope it works out alright and wish you good luck.

And as Bill Taylor and jclements said, I too am wondering if/how this affects the Open source project.

[gwpriester]

Sorry to be so late with my congratulations. I was trying to take the day off and just checked in!

I know there is a lot of concern that Xara may not continue to develop. But how can such a fantastic program not continue? And how can such a fantastic program not continue to improve to the point where it will give Illustrator a real run for its money?

Gary

[rpc9943]

"general usability improvements" oooh yes for a xara xtreme owner that sounds VERY good to me!!!

i knew something fishy was happening when i got that great magix video editor deal- a great prog too!!

RonC

[Odat]

I for one welcome our new MAGIX Overlords...

Seriously though, this sounds like good news all around, even if the only thing that changes is that Xara will be in more retail distribution channels. I don't know if that will happen outside of Europe or what, but even if it doesn't, that's still tons more exposure to great software by the general public.

I also imagine that the new exposure and the backing of a larger company will indeed allow for more innovations in the already awesome Xara software packages.

Congrats to the Xara team!

[Nostaw]

Congratulations Xara! This is a great opportunity to show off your products and show the world on what they missed out for the last couple years.

I'm curious though, does the deal include for MAGIX to have full access to all sourcecodes written by Xara?

[remi]

Hi Nostaw,

I'm curious though, does the deal include for MAGIX to have full access to all sourcecodes written by Xara?

Why not? Magix is the new owner of the company. But would you show all 303 employees from Magix the source code (99 of them are marketing people and not developers)? Certainly not. Only the Xara developers need access to the source code. And access to the powerful assembler code of Xara's kernel is surely access restricted to only one or two core developers within Xara.

Did you analyze the source code and the documentation under http://www.xaraxtreme.org? It's interesting to learn some intern details of Xara Xtreme.

Regards,
Remi

[Klaus Nordby]

It all sounds very promising: more capital, more marketing, more distribution. It seems to be a radically different deal from the old Corel deal, so we don't need to entertain such worries. I'll be rooting for Xara in their forthcoming battles with the Krauts -- mostly. For maybe, just maybe, the logical Krauts can bash some of the more annoying British eccentricities out of our dear Xara? :-)

[markJ]

Perhaps we can continue to inspire magix with our artwork and letters.
They have layed their hands on a golden egg and are already into
creative softwares so I`m sure they are keen on keeping this
creative tool buzzing, I think were only seeing the start of a great
climb for Xara.
Unlike microsoft when they grabbed expression and
aneasthetized it with 40 kilo of morphine. But thats a great company
and I don`t run one so I`ll shut up.

[Anders 205]

Congratulations to the deal, Charles. May the move be beneficial to all.

Cheers, Anders