From: Ted Gould [mailto:ted@...11...] Sent: 15 October 2005 00:36

...

A couple of things here:

• Do you expect to release the Live Effect plugins as open source

also?

I thought so, but you listed it here as the additional features in a boxed version.

We can and will make the Xara owned ones Open Source. But we bundle many (17 at the last count) provided by third party companies that specialise in providing Photoshop plugins, such as Alien Skin. Very cool effects but we have no ownership or control over them.

• It sounds like your initial plan is not to sell a Linux boxed

version,

is that correct?

There is no short term plan to sell a boxed Linux version. Down the road (one we get to a 1.0 stage) if we can add enough added value, this might be possible. e.g. if we can persuade the likes of Alien Skin to create Linux compatible plug-ins that we could bundle in a premium boxed version, and if enough people want things like commercial support, CD, manuals, whatever, then it's a possibility.

• Have you looked at the embedded Linux market? One device that I'm

anticipating is the Nokia 770, which will run Linux. My understanding is that the graphics application there is... well... Xara could

probably

help :) An uber-fast rendering engine would definitely be of interest to embedded developers. I think this could be an exciting potential market for Xara, and companies like Nokia would probably pay for the porting to their device.

I love the device, and would love to put something like Xara on it. But this is exactly what I'd hope would be one of the benefits of going open-source. We couldn't justify spending time on this (unless Nokia pay us) but if there are enough enthusiasts willing to put the work in then they can take our code and create it for themselves, and everyone else. It would be very cool to do.

I totally agree on the Pantone point, but that leads me to say, why

not

just leave the whole thing as LGPL

Not an option because it could then be used by our commercial competitors, especially on Windows, against us. Would be hugely damaging. So I'm with Stallman on the copyleft aspect of GPL. We make our stuff free and can be used by anyone else as long as they make their stuff free as well.

and not worry about the BSD stuff. Then you can link to other libraries as need be, and sell that as your boxed version. Then users can contribute under their copyright, and licensed under a single license. This would protect you from the case where a significant contribution could be integrated by Adobe without any contribution to the community.

Ah do you mean why can't we take contributions in LGPL? If I understand LGPL correctly that only allows for linking via a defined library API. So it doesn't work for contributions to the code itself. That would still prevent us (or anyone) creating versions containing other non-open licensed code.

Charles