Here is finally the 5th update of the VOICE QT 5/browser funding campaign. Sorry for the long delay again some private issue's
with the health of a family member required some attention . So where do we stand ?
The porting of QT 5 has began and the first part of what was outlined in the roadmap is finished.
A total of 5000+7825=12825 US Dollars were collected.
The funding campaign from Sigurd Fastenrath on os2.org collected a total of 4430 Euro.
OS/2 VOICE has currently spent the money in the following way:
Development for May and June have been paid with an amount of 4000 US Dollar per month.
To fullfill Sigurd his campaign OS/2 VOICE sponsored 1650 Euro. This was done, because the orginal target was set to
4250 Euro. And when the target would not be reached the whole campaign would have been withdrawn with no money collected. This money was directly send to bww bitwise works GmbH (hereinafter called BWW).
The people at BWW would like to thank everybody for sponsoring/donating. However as you may understand we need more money for this big project to keep moving forward. The current Qt version 4.7.3 we have on OS/2 (to be found as rpm at Netlabs) shows it's age and a lot newer applications need Qt 5 as a requirement. That's the version BWW is porting right now. There are several reasons this is such a large project. The most notable is that Qt (Qt 5) envolved a lot since version 4.7.3. In summary why Qt is important and usefull for OS/2 (ArcaOS): Qt makes software development smarter. It is a powerful plattform neutral framework that makes it easy to bring many applications to OS/2 that were written for various other plattforms. Right now we have more than 270 Qt based applications and with Qt 5 even more can be ported.
What BWW does in the background when working on major ports.
We (OS/2 VOICE and BWW) try to make all OS/2 users aware of what work is being done to keep software ports created. Next to major projects such as Firefox and Qt BWW maintains a total of over 260 projects for OS/2 which are distributed via Netlabs RPM. To get a better understanding of what BWW does, please look at the presentation SIlvan Scherrer he gave at Warpstock Europe 2018. Dmitry Kuminov (the main developer at BWW) also gave a presentation at Warpstock Europe 2018.
It gives a better idea what massive amount of work BWW has to do to keep a lot of applications on our favorite operating system running. What Dmitry explained is that porting software to OS/2 is sometimes a very labour intensive process because certain libraries need to be ported first. Some libraries (DLL) we do not have on OS/2 or we have older versions and they need to be updated. This is why porting applications to OS/2 can take longer or even a lot longer.
We need your donations
100% of your donation will go to BWW. All information in these postings has been jointly written and approved with BWW.
Previosly OS/2 VOICE did not have a Paypal account. If you want you can now donate with Paypal directly to VOICE. We found a way to make administration easier for our treasurer. This is especially convenient for people living in the European Union. If you want to send a wire transfer please visit the ourwebsite for details.
But you can of course also donate via the Arca Noae website. This is handy if you want to make a donation in US Dollars. I