Quark has announced a change in its licensing for its flagship desktop publishing application: the company has now moved to platform-independent licenses and packaging for QuarkXPress 7, which it says is a result of the company’s on-going commitment to improve licensing policies and procedures for customers and channel partners. “In an effort to provide our customers with the most efficient and effective way to use QuarkXPress at home and at work, we are providing platform-independent licensing,” said Jürgen Kurz, Quark senior vice president of desktop products. “Creative minds should be free to design and innovate on any platform, and Quark is continuing to provide that freedom with our creative tools.” Individual QuarkXPress users can now "double-activate" a single license on different platforms at no additional cost; customers can use the same QuarkXPress 7 license on Windows or Mac OS — or both.

In addition, because of another recent change regarding Quark licenses, previous versions of QuarkXPress can run under the same license when users are upgrading to QuarkXPress 7. In connection with the change, separate part numbers for the Mac OS and Windows versions of QuarkXPress 7 and the part codes for platform cross-grades are no longer required and will be phased out. All orders will be fulfilled using a platform-independent validation code.