As I mentioned last year, Openismus managed to stabilize for a while after we first had to slim down from 16 employees at our height. Our core team took on greater responsibility and worked hard to transform the company, with incredible results.

However, we haven’t managed to sustain that, so we’ve recently had to lose more great developers and close the Berlin office, keeping just the Munich office. There are many ways to look at it but in the end we must yield to the mathematics. Luckily, we’ve managed to help some people move over to KDAB in Berlin, who we’ve been working with recently. KDAB are good people who do similar work, mostly around Qt, though they are larger and sustainably successful. I’m sure that our ex-Openismus stars will drive a trail of success wherever they choose to go, still fighting entropy. I’m not too sad now that I know everyone is OK and because I know that we’ve had time to try things.

Openismus will continue at least for now, working on Rygel and Evolution-Data-Server as we still have a little customer work there. But we can no longer employ sales people, so we’ll have to hope that little contracts turn up here and there through personal contacts. I’m not optimistic, mostly because the last few months have worn down my perseverance.

We no longer have the capacity to work on the Maliit on-screen keyboard. However, the project is still very much alive and I believe that Develer and KDAB can offer quality Maliit consulting. We just couldn’t wait around long enough for the right customer to sign a contract.

Likewise, we have lost our Wayland expertise, but Jan Arne Petersen, who did the Wayland Input Methods work, will be working at KDAB, so I’m sure that an interested customer could continue to fund similar work.