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invers Software
 

2002-08-20: invers Software bought Calamus rights from MGI/Roxio

The dream comes true:
invers Software buys Calamus rights from MGI/Roxio.

The Calamus story

Back in 1995, invers tried to buy the copyright for Calamus SL from the former DMC company in Germany. The contract was never signed because DMC sold the complete Calamus SL and Calamus for Windows to the newly founded Canadian company, MGI Software Corp. MGI was created from the former ISD resp. DMC Canada and focussed on SOHO software products. The most famous mass products from MGI were and still are PhotoSuite and VideoWave.

In Summer 1997, invers was granted the development and worldwide exclusive distribution rights for Calamus SL from MGI. While invers successfully released Calamus SL96 and SL98, MGI still worked on a new release of Calamus for Windows, called Calamus Digital Publisher 2.0. This version was never released. MGI decided in December 1998 not to put Calamus in MGI's product range because of its high support requirements.

At this time invers decided to release Calamus SL for Windows, too. In fact, Calamus SL was combined with a wrapper for Windows and the dialog look was tuned for Windows. Since the successful release of SL99 WinPack Calamus SL has found its place on Windows computers, too.

Ulf Dunkel from invers Software went to Toronto in spring 2000 in order to get the Software rights for Calamus SL and the distribution rights for Calamus Publisher. At this time MGI didn't see a chance for giving away the rights. Calamus Publisher was technically outdated at this time, third-party licenses had expired already.

At the end of 2001, the American Adaptec company ROXIO Inc. incorporated MGI. Now Ulf Dunkel could finally purchase the Calamus SL rights from ROXIO. Since July 26 2002, invers Software owns the Calamus rights — Calamus is back home in Germany again.

Calamus future

When MGI owned the Calamus rights, invers Software was not allowed to port Calamus SL to Windows or Mac OS. Although this restriction is no longer valid, an immediate port of the complete Calamus system with some millions of lines of code in C and assembler doesn't make sense. This work would devour several man years of development resources without pushing the Calamus techniques forward. Therefore Ulf Dunkel decided a so-called incremental porting. Even now several parts of the Calamus system are run native under Mac OS and Windows, while other parts still require the appropriate wrapper which runs the original TOS code under Windows or Mac OS.

The main steps on the to do list are: implementing the high-precision 160-bit vector output engine, a relaunch of the user interface and a redesign of text formatting. Of course the adaption of Calamus for Mac OS X has highest priority, too. MagicMacX, the new wrapper for Calamus under Mac OS X, has been finished in version 1.0 already. The binding to the Mac OS X system printer drivers is still under development. In the Calamus web site, a development system basing on the well-known Bugzilla system will be installed, giving all Calamus users more influence on the ongoing development of Calamus. This development system offers, for example, detailed bug report techniques with automatic notification e-mails when a feature changes, a voting system for very important bugs and status reports.

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