[This regular feature presents the latest information from RISCOS Ltd, and is written by the company's Managing Director. The following article is reproduced from issue 13 of the magazine (September 2003).]
We are over three quarters of the way through the year, and I have to be honest and say that very little has happened in the way I would have expected, this year. But that's the nature of business nowadays: the secret is being able to change quickly to match the new circumstances.
As happened last year, I had invited members of the public as well as shareholders to come along, ask questions and view the proceedings.
Aaron Timbrell and Graeme Barnes from Virtual Acorn were present, showing the latest version of Virtual RPC-SE on a portable and a desktop computer. David Atkins and Dave Prosser from MicroDigital were also present, showing a couple of Omegas and an Alpha portable.
The first half of the afternoon was taken up with the formalities of the AGM and I presented the highlights of the accounts for the year ended 31st January 2003.
An important point that I made to the shareholders was that now, after four years since the original release of RISC OS 4, a number of new factors have come into play which would have an effect on future profitability of the company.
In order to progress with major future development of RISC OS it is currently planned that RISCOS Ltd will be making a new issue of shares early in 2004.
The current status of RISCOS Ltd is that it is a closed company, which means that it cannot make a public offering of shares. It can, however, take on a maximum of 50 new private investors each year, and new shares are first offered pro-rata to existing shareholders, and then any shares not taken up are offered to new investors.
The highlights of the accounts are that we have sold a total of 4,504 RISC OS 4 upgrades, together with 2,000 licences to licensees. Approx 1,600 new machines have been sold with RISC OS 4 pre-installed.
Our current Mission Statement is to provide a continued availability and route to market for the 26-bit version of RISC OS. We shall seek to find new licensees for RISC OS 4 and work with licensees to support new hardware. We shall also develop RISC OS Select for all platforms.
Our plans for the next year include further work on enhancing 26-bit versions of RISC OS via the Select scheme. We declined to purchase RISC OS from Pace as we had already bought the exclusive licence for the desktop market, and the conditions that Pace wanted to place on the sale of RISC OS would have meant that we would have been paying twice for it.
I pointed out to the attendees at the AGM that no current licensee has made a commitment that would justify funding internal development of our own 32-bit version of RISC OS at present, but that such work would have to be undertaken at some point in the future.
After a break we moved on to discuss the detail of the future plans for 2003/4. I pointed out that we would be continuing RISC OS Select development, with RISC OS 4.37 being on display on the demonstration machines. Select has very many improvements over RISC OS 5, as well as a considerable number of bug fixes to errors which are still present in RISC OS 5. Select will not be available for softloading on top of RISC OS 3.7.
Some of the features being planned for Select 4 include:
Special Select ROM images will be available for registered users of Virtual Acorn, and we are also in final stages of developing a new RISC OS 4 ROM set featuring the major new features from Select. We are also considering the following new products:
The new RISC OS 4 ROMs will include DHCP networking and would allow new versions of RISC OS to be bootable direct from CD. The current pricing is estimated at £140 for users upgrading directly from RISC OS 3.x, with a sliding scale down to approximately £75 for long-time subscribers to the Select scheme. Availability of these ROMs will be strictly limited.
The meeting then went on to discuss a number of issues relating to the purchase by Castle Technology of the RISC OS IPR from Pace, including the future status of RISC OS developments. I pointed out that, whilst the merging of Select and RISC OS 5 is desirable, it is also a lot of work. Many of the Select features rely on changes to the kernel and the RISC OS 5 kernel is significantly different to the RISC OS 4 version. It is, however, our intention to make as many Select features as possible available for RISC OS 5 users. I also pointed out that, with the amount of development that RISCOS Ltd has put into the desktop version of RISC OS, it would make sense if RISCOS Ltd were the company to continue to develop desktop RISC OS, whilst Castle/Tematic focussed on the new markets that they are seeking.
Time will tell if things work out that way; as I said at the start, the secret is adapting to change and seizing new opportunities as quickly as possible.
Paul Middleton
Managing Director, RISCOS Ltd