Dear OS/2 community,
As summer is more or less over (we hope you enjoyed your holidays!), we would like to recall the ongoing efforts to port the current Qt 5 framework to OS/2! During the summer break we have not collected that much money over the last 2 months. Most likely this was caused by the vacation period.
10 months ago the Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation (referred as “VOICE”) teamed up with bww bitwise works GmbH (referred as "bitwise") in order to make Qt 5 a reality on OS/2.
Why Qt 5?
We already ported Qt 4 to OS/2 and it is an ongoing story of success. Qt 4 enabled us to have numerous applications that were easy to port to OS/2 because Qt is a platform independent framework from ground up. Just think of Quassel, PSi, VirtualBox, qpdfview, SMplayer and many more. The latest version we have at netlabs.org is version 4.7.3 and it is showing its age.
“bitwise” has already started to tackle the job and a lot has been done already. You may monitor our twitter feed or hook directly into our github repository in order to see what is being done right now. The goal is to repeat the success story of Qt 4 on a more modern basis.
And there is a bonus…
We had to acknowledge that Firefox has become more or less undoable for us, from version 52 onward. Why? Please, read this article, it fully covers this topic http://articles.os2voice.org.
Now what about the bonus? A significant part of Qt 5 is QtWebEngine and that is the basis for many Qt-based web browsers (most notably, Falkon which is a new name for QupZilla). QtWebEngine uses Chromium, an open source web engine used by Google in their very successful Google Chrome web browser. The current plan is to port Chromium as part of QtWebEngine. But later this port may be used standalone, e.g. to port Google Chrome to OS/2 (if Google ever makes Chrome itself open source).
The leap from version Qt 4.7.3 to version 5.11 is a huge one. But we are on track: 25% have already been done as described in this roadmap.
And that brings us to the next item:
Good software does not grow on trees. Unfortunately not.
Both Herwig Bauernfeind and most notably Silvan Scherrer make little to no money from "bitwise" and work by and large for free. However “bitwise” is a commercial company driven by 3 OS/2 enthusiasts.
The 3rd “bitwiser”, Dmitriy Kuminov, is not in the position to work for free. Dmitriy works as a full time developer and unlike Silvan and Herwig, Dmitriy has to make a living from that. And driving a company brings costs for many kinds of stuff that has to be provided in order to make it run.
Dmitriy now works fully on the Qt 5 port. The goal is to get it going and provide it for free to the community.
That said, "bitwise" is not the manufacturer of ArcaOS and is not affiliated with Arca Noae LLC. Both companies are strategic partners, but beside that they are completely separate companies.
Therefore, we encourage all members of the OS/2 community to support us:
* You can buy your license of ArcaOS or subscription via the "bitwise" online shop.
* You can make a direct donation via the OS/2 Paypal donation button:
Another new way to sponsor BWW 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