Succession planning for JPSoftware

[Joe Caverly]

This is a morbid question for some,
but I was wondering what succession plans are in place for JPSoftware
in the event of the death of the companies main person.

Will the product no longer be upgraded/updated?
Will there be no tech support and no new features?
Will this support forum cease to exist?

With the plugin feature of TCC,
new features can always be added,
which is a positive.

When Bob Zale unexpectedly past away in November 2012,
at the age of 66,
the users of PowerBASIC were left with only the support forum.

His wife, Vivian Zale, was left with quite the mess to clean up.

PowerBASIC is written in assembly code,
of which there are few remaining experts these days.

Fortunately, a PowerBASIC customer, Adam Drake,
who had built his companies accounting program using PowerBASIC,
purchased everything from Vivia Zale.

Things went on okay for a few years,
but then Adam Drake's company was purchased,
and the new owners were not that interested in PowerBASIC.

Now, the PowerBASIC Forum lives on, who knows how much longer.

We lost Steve Hutchesson (Hutch) back in May of 2023.
Steve was also an assembly code guru,
who made major contrubtions to PowerBASIC.

The PowerBASIC forum members recently learned that the domain has been renewed for another year,
but communication with the new owners of the PowerBASIC Source Code and forum is next to nothing.

I'm hoping that we all live to be healthy in our old age,
but life is what happens when we are busy making other plans.

Joe

 

[ron]

Morbid yeah, but valid. XXCOPY (used daily) and recently ThumbsPlus come to mind. Fortunately neither required on-line activation. That would be my biggest concern - that the last version could at least be activated forever, as many times as needed as I move to new computers/OS's in the years to come. Unless there's currently a back-door that could just be revealed at a point in time, a plan would need to be in place to allow the product to allow perpetual installs. Granted I've never read the entire EULA, so maybe there's an out that essentially states that it's not guaranteed to work forever - which again is also valid since OS changes could render some of it non-functional.