"Xara is pleased to announce that it intends to make its flagship graphics product, Xara X, open oource. Xara is also working to bring it to the Linux and Mac platforms. Xara X is the world's fastest and we believe the most versatile graphics software. It's primarily a vector graphics program but is one of the new generation of cross-over products that handles photos and drawings with equal ease."

Microsoft is nearing a settlement of RealNetworks' long-running antitrust lawsuit with a deal valued at $750 million (E624 million), according to reports. Under terms of the settlement, which could still fall through, Microsoft would offer a combination of cash and promotions for RealNetworks' music and game services through Microsoft's online services and software, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. In addition, the newspaper said, the two companies would collaborate on technology initiatives in the future. Update: It's official.

"Yesterday, I was among a few lucky journalists in New York City who got a rare chance to play a collection of new games on the eagerly awaited Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console. In short, I was impressed. The brain, capable of one teraflop, is three symmetrical IBM cores running at 3.2 GHz each. Stellar graphics performance is provided by a 500 MHz custom ATI graphics processor and backed up by super fast memory, 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM that is shared with the CPUs via a unified memory architecture."

Here is an interview with Bill Buck and Raquel Velasco of Genesi, the company behind the PowerPC G4 Open Desktop Workstation. They talk about MorphOS, Java, the ODW, future plans for the ODW, and much more.

"Xcode is a powerful professional tool that allows you to perform the most common software development tasks simply, quickly, and in a way that should be familiar. Its capabilities, however, are much more powerful than what is needed to build just a single type of application. Xcode is designed to let you build any kind of software product you can dream of. From Cocoa and Carbon applications to kernel extensions and Spotlight importers, Xcode is up to the task."

The Microsoft exec in charge of Office has dismissed last week's tie-up between Sun and Google as allusion rather than substance. "That announcement didn't have anything," Chris Capossela, corporate vice president Information Worker Product Management Group of Microsoft told a crowd of reporters last week. "It had something about a toolbar and Java Runtime, and it alluded to a potential thing some time in the future. OpenOffice isn’t hard to get, just go to their website and download the software."