It is with great regret and more than a touch of sadness that I have to announce that Blair and I have made the decision to stop selling and developing Dolphin Smalltalk. We will continue to distribute the free version of Dolphin X6 indefinitely and continue to sell the Professional version, which should now be purchased on an "as is" basis. Some limited support will remain in place for existing users of X6 but there will not be a future major release of Dolphin for .net (or Mac or Linux).

We have come to this point for a number of reasons, the most potent of which is the fact that it is just not commercially viable (and to be truthful it has never really been so) to continue development of the product. There are simply not enough people who are able to recognise that Smalltalk offers something much better than the tools and languages "du jour". The shift of Microsoft away from the Win32 API to the .net platform (and the associated presentation foundation) has not helped and would mean a dedicated development effort of sufficient intensity that we just can't commit to it given the potential returns.

We started Object Arts almost exactly 10 years ago with a view to continuing the development of Dolphin which had been started and then abruptly terminated at our previous company, Intuitive Systems Ltd. Both of us were of a mind that this was something that needed to be done; not only because Smalltalk was quite the best development environment we had come across but because we felt that the work already completed on Dolphin was some of the best we had achieved in our careers to that point. It seemed important that Dolphin Smalltalk should be carried forward and that other developers be given the chance to "see the light". These sentiments remain with us today but the cold reality is that we have to look for other sources of income for our families and the future.

So what of the future? Blair has taken up a job with Microsoft Research in the UK and I am occupied full-time developing stock trading systems under the Alchemetrics banner (still using Dolphin Smalltalk). The latter should mean that Dolphin will not die quickly because we have a wealth of software that relies on it to continuing operating smoothly. The nature of Smalltalk with the fact that most of the source is "open" means that existing users should be able to continue using the Dolphin products and not have to port away to other platforms (and hopefully never to C# or Java). We will try to issue the 6.1 maintenance release that we have been using internally (wrapping all outstanding bug fixes) before the end of this year.

There will no doubt be a number of you who would suggest that we Open Source Dolphin. Of course, you are free harbour such opinions and to discuss the idea on the newsgroup but please do not expect us to be persuaded. It simply will not happen! Both Blair and I dislike the Open Source movement intensely and we would rather see Dolphin gradually disappear into the sands of time than instantly lose all commercial value in one fell swoop. But this is a discussion for another thread. The best, and probably only, way in which the future of Dolphin could be assured would be a sale of the assets to another company. Whilst we are not actively seeking buyers, serious negotiations can be started by writing to me at my e-mail address.

At this point, I cannot sign off without commenting on the enthusiasm and talent in the Dolphin community that has sustained us all these years. There are people on the Dolphin newsgroup who have been with us since the early days back in 1997. There are a number of you who have supported Dolphin far beyond the call of duty and I sincerely thank you for this. I don't want to name names for fear that I forget someone but you know who you are and I thank you again. Doubtless, many of you will be disappointed by this decision but I hope that you understand now why this has to be.

Best regards,

Andy Bower
Dolphin Support

PS: we came to this decision several weeks ago. For those of you who have recently purchased Dolphin Professional and are now unhappy with the decision, we will honour requests for a refund for any purchases made within the last 60 days.