The end of GrafX and how to continue from here

GrafX Database Systems, the company from Brian Feldman, has closed shop. Many of you have already seen that and commented on that.

On the former GrafX website an accusing finger is pointed to us and accusations are made that we have "stolen" products from GrafX.
That is a blatant lie and very far from the truth.  We did not respond on this website before because we tried to solve this the political way by talking with GrafX but we failed to do so.

Let's look back at why the X# project was started:

We started the X# project out of frustration about the way that GrafX / Brian was managing the development of Visual Objects and Vulcan and about the free fall these products were in due to lack of interest, communication and vision from the product owner.
For this reason Robert had already left the GrafX development team and Nikos, Fabrice and Chris were about to do the same in 2015.

We joined our forces and started this project together. Of course, we were helped a lot by the fact that Microsoft had released the Roslyn source code, and of course it helped a lot that we had done this before. Our motto was "we did it before, we can do it again".

At the start of our project we have approached Brian/GrafX and offered to buy what was left of Vulcan and we also offered him a share in our annual revenues for the FOX program. At first Brian agreed, but later he declined for reasons not known to us. This was short after we asked for proof of the ownership of the source code and for proof of the sales figures (due diligence).
We have speculated about the reasons for his change of mind. Some ideas we had were:

• He could not proof ownership of the product most likely for one of the following reasons:
  
  
  • some source code in Vulcan is most likely still copyright CA,
    
    
  • he has never asked his developers to sign anything to transfer their intellectual property to him
    
    
• The sales figures that he told us about were made up

Whatever his real reasons, we did not have a deal and we went our own way. GrafX did not like that because we were now both competing in the same market. And we all know how that competition went: GrafX had no development team and did not make any progress. The number of VOPS subscribers went downhill where our team created new versions, integrated into a new version of Visual Studio etc. and we got more and more FOX subscribers.

And yes, we told you, our customers, that you could use your version of the Vulcan Runtime with our product. There is nothing illegal in that. In fact, the Vulcan documentation describes exactly how you can use Vulcan assemblies in other .Net development languages.  So, this is a scenario that GrafX was already prepared for.

Anyway, like we said before, after the announcement that GrafX has closed shop, we have approached Brian Feldman again and asked him to remove the lies from his website and to bury the hatchet and to work together in the interest of the community.
We also offered him money for some of the runtime source code that we are still interested in. Unfortunately, Brian did not even bother to reply to our email and has not changed his website. He has chosen to ignore us.

This leaves our community in an awkward position. GrafX has closed and was the only company selling Visual Objects and ReportPro.

We have been in contact with the original developers and owners of ReportPro and they have expressed to us that they want you, the customers, to be supported as good as possible. Due to obligations at their current jobs they cannot do that themselves.

Now that GrafX is no longer in business there is no longer a company where you can buy ReportPro and get ReportPro support. Brian is still selling it on his website but is very unclear who is behind this website and we have been told that customers will not get an invoice or support.

A few months ago, we have started ReportPro support on our website for FOX subscribers. We have decided that we will now also include support for other VO and Vulcan developers and that you can now also buy the product from us. The sales infrastructure is not ready yet, but if you are interested, please send us a message. We will add ReportPro 2 and ReportPro 3  to our online shop but you can also buy it with a normal Invoice and pay with a bank wire.

The pricing for ReportPro will be:

Support will be given through our webforums.