Dear OS/2 community,

It has been about 6 months ago since the Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation (referred as “VOICE”) send out a status update about the funding campaign to support bww bitwise works GmbH (referred as "bitwise") company. Bitwise has are working on porting the latest version of the QT platform to OS/2. The reason you have not heard anything from VOICE is because I had some medical issue's. I am recovering and slowly picking up on some OS/2 stuff again, such as Warpstock Europe that will be held in Utrecht in de The Netherlands on the 18 and 19th of May. For more information please visit www.warpstock.eu.

Bitwise has however not stopped working on the QT project and a lot of progress has been made. Please check this old posting for the roadmap that was published jointly by VOICE and Bitwise. Currently Dmitriy Kuminov, the developer from Bitwise is working one of the most important DLL's. This is the QT DLL that provides the graphics in applications.

Of the QT port about 60 to 70% of the project is finished now. The QT test suite has also been used to make certain the QT port works correctly. You can read more about it here. This was posted on the 31st of December 2018: "The debug build passes 68572 tests (with only 2 failures as well, for the same reason). This is quite a number. Apparently, Qt5 is going to be the best Qt for OS/2 port ever."

In some cases however work is not performed directly on the QT project itsekf. Like with the previous big project Bitwise worked on, such as the Firefox browser, updates where made to many libraries to make it possible to deliver Firefox on ArcaOS/OS/2. All the Linux software ported to ArcaOS/OS/2 use a couple of core DLL's. One of these sets of DLL's are called LIBC. In order to make QT work updates had to be made to the LIBC DLlL's. You can read more on the details here. So your donation is put to good use!

You can see how much money is donated here. We are currently at about 22.000 Euro. We need your help as a community to make this import port of Bitwise move forward. All source code is provided free of charge to the world and is always checked in here. Bitwise works counts on YOUR donations to make this happen. You can read here how you can donate money to Bitwise here: www.os2voice.org/membership.html. A lot of people in the community download software from the Netlabs server without fully releasing a lot of that work is being performed by Bitwise. So please continue to donate!

Another new way to sponsor Bitwise monthly is by using Patreon. Each month you donate an amount, you decide.

This is a statement that was jointly written by the Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation and bww bitwise works GmbH.

Best regards,

Roderick Klein             &    The "bitwise" team

Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation         Silvan, Herwig and Dmitriy