Xara recently announced that its product XaraXtreme, a vector graphics application, will be open sourced and ported to Linux and Mac OS X. In parallel, Xara is sponsoring the development of a Xara to SVG converter, as part of the Uber-Converter open source project, that will better enable interoperability with the Inkscape project. More infos at http://www.xaraxtreme.org, http://www.inkscape.org/, news4neighbours and Uber-Converter project homepage. With the announcement of the Adobe/Macromedia merger and the likely abandonement of Macromedia Freehand, a new vector graphics alternative to Adobe Illustrator is good news.