Today development of native applications is nearly at zero. The last standing vendors you can count on two hands. One of the last vendors is the company ROM logicware, well known in germany as the developer of the office software Papyrus. Further development, especially the development of the upgrade to version 11 (available for Windows and Mac for a long time) is still in the air for more than 6 months now.
I think its time to do something.
I believe there is enough interest from endusers or companies, which are able to sponsor the development with an additional financial gift outsite of the normal licences.
I did the first step with my engineer office, and pitched an amount of 500 EUR into the pot. I have published the initiative, and some other sponsers have since come around. Currently we are at 1.200,- EUR total, and the sponsors itself also intend to buy an additional 13 licences. In sum you can say its a value of over ~2000 EUR.
One condition of the sponsoring would be, that there will be an open beta test for the upcoming product. Another condition from us would be, that operating system specific bugs will be fixed.
Ulli Ramps, CEO of ROM logicware said last December, that they would need at least 100 licences to cover the costs to develop the upgrade to Papyrus 11. Maybe there are some higher requirement to make the version available in english. But currently there are only ~50 users (counted on the update from papyrus 9.x to v.10).
I think we (the sponsors) should cover the biggest part of the neccessary costs, so development should be independent of single user registrations.
If you would like to sponsor the product, then please contact me. Best is to use the text form, which is available from here:
English form:
http://www.subsys.de/misc/Pap11OS2en.zip
German form:
http://www.subsys.de/misc/Pap11OS2.zip
Please fill it out, and send it to me (per fmail, fax or snail mail). You will find contact addresses in the form. Please send only the form, no money at this moment!
kind regards
Frank Wochatz
Source: OS2VOICE