Our message about supporting ReportPro has raised some questions, which we would like to answer here.
But before we do, let us please explain why we are doing this:
Many VO developers have applications that rely on 3rd party code. bBrowser, Vo2Ado and ReportPro are the most common ones. Apart from that there is RightSLE and the tools from Fabrice.
It will be difficult for VO developers to move forward if there is no solution for their 3rd party products. That is why we want to offer our help.
Here is what we have in mind:
- We have no intention to sell new licenses of Classmate (CM), ReportPro 2 (RP2) or ReportPro 3 (RP3). These products are "end of life".
- On top of that we cannot sell these products because the original copyright owners cannot transfer their rights anymore (for legal reasons that we cannot explain here).
- After the conversion of RP2, CM and RP3 from VO to Vulcan the copyright to the Vulcan version of these products has become very unclear: most of the copyright still belongs to original owners, part of it to DataSupport in Belgium who did the conversion to .NET and finally also GrafX claims copyright. This really has become a legal nightmare. We do not want to get involved in that.
- We want to encourage people to use other tools for new reporting. That is why we will only support existing customers. There are plenty other reporting tools for .Net applications. If you need help for this, ask around, for example on our forums.
- People that have a source code license of a version of RP2 or RP3 (proof of purchase required) will get support at the source code level. Of course we will also supply binaries.
- People that have a license for the RP2 or RP3 binaries (including customers that bought VO 2.6 and VO 2.7 in which RP2 was included for free) will get support at the binary level. Proof of purchase is also required.
- We intend to provide versions of RP2 and RP3 for X# and we will supply patched versions of these products for VO when needed.
So to summarize:
- It is not our plan to make major changes to RP2 and RP3. All we want is to keep the products alive.
- We want to help people to make the move from VO/Win32 to X#/.NET without making major changes to their apps.
- Everybody that has a legal copy of ReportPro will be supported. Either at binary level or at source code level.
- Support will be part of the FOX program.
We hope this makes things clearer.