Rogerio,
Ivan's portuguese seems to be in order but if it is ok, for the forum at large, I will respond in english.
The future: MicroFour has spent a substantial amount of money and time developing SF out of a great need for a framework for our medical product. We like you, purchased several frameworks that either evaporated or were not designed for a robust application. We continue to enhance SF and make normal bug fixes. As our medical applications grows we actually incorporate new features to accommodate our needs. Additionally, .NET will release major changes, in regards to data handling in the coming months through 2008. As those changes are available we will enhance the framework.
It is paramount to MicroFour that all changes are backward compatible or permitted to coexist with existing software. I would not be interested in making changes to SF that would obsolete all the the code we have generated on the medical side of things. Generally speaking, MicroFour's products have a long life and we have never left anyone on an island.
What we are building is a community of developers and like a family not everyone gets what they want all of the time, unless you are my five year of son, of course. Our goal is to serve the community and produce better products than the "bad guys." It is not a perfect world but we care and at least we are accessible but some means.
Our business model is all about understanding the problem. For example, in order to totally understand the medical business we own a clinic that serves 40-60 patients a day. We don't have to ask someone to explain what we need in the medical software. On the other hand we enjoy the same privilege on the framework, we use it to program daily and see its strengths and try to resolve its weaknesses.
Steve, CEO