RISCOS Ltd. said today that it will make a "personalised" deal with anyone who wants to upgrade to Adjust or a copy of Select 3i4. The company is ditching its myriad of discounts and sliding scale pricing in favour of a one-on-one chat, via email or phone, to negotiate a sale. Factors that will decide the final price will include how many RISC OS 4 upgrades previously purchased, Foundation and Select subscriptions, how long you've been using RISC OS, and amazingly, how polite you are.Beyond that, ROL's new pricing scheme, which lasts until the end of the year, is a black box of mystery.
ROL hope developers and punters will upgrade en masse to RISC OS 4.39, enticing third party programmers into taking advantage of the various features and abilities provided by modern RISC OS 4 - such as the image file rendering system. ROL bosses will also be crossing their fingers that this new sweeping special offer will alleviate the company's cash flow problem, caused by Select subscribers walking out after a lack of updates and legal costs from last summer's platform in-fighting.
The developers of RISC OS 4 have also suggested that third party software programmers could design their applications to use Select features, and then inform the user that functionality which requires RISC OS 4.39 has been disabled if the user isn't using a recent version of RISC OS 4. Which, of course, includes Castle's RISC OS 5.
ROL MD Paul Middleton argued that, "everyone would be encouraged to get the latest version of the OS instead of still running RISC OS 3.X on their RiscPC, because they still rely on an 11-year old public domain application. If everyone continues to work to the lowest common denominator then the market will totally stagnate."
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RISCOS Ltd. statement