The future of ZevenOS looks bad. The community effort to create a free and open source linux distribution bringing the beos look and feel back has dried out. Currently only I am there as the main developer of ZevenOS. Exactly one week ago I asked for help in the community but there was near to nothing feedback on this topic. I know that there are a few people who want to use ZevenOS but neither of them is capable or willing to effort time to support ZevenOS in an open and free manner.
It should be clear than that even for me working on a project alone is no real fun anymore(like it was in the beginning were lots of people got interested and had suggestions and wanted to help) and is really hard if you are on your own. The only way I see me working again on ZevenOS even for an 5.0 release is taking money from those who want a ZevenOS distribution. For that matter I calculated the money it costs to create a new ZevenOS 5.0 release (without adding new features, which might take extra development time). I think that the work to create a new release based upon Xubuntu 12.10 takes about 1 working week (5 days) including testing and fixing bugs if necessary. If I work for lets say 5 days each day 8 hours and for each hour I take 5€ (6,45$) I would get 40€ (51,61$) on one day. If count that with the 5 days for working you will get to 200€ (258,08$).
And thats exactly my calculated cost for a next ZevenOS release. (excluding server costs)
So if this amount of money can come together by donations I will garantee you to bring a new ZevenOS release out this year. If not(and also there isn’t a change of heart in the developer support) than unfortunately I have to say: “Thats it for ZevenOS”.
As I know money and especially money for an opensource project is a highly controversial topic I invite everyone to discuss this in our forum.

Also notice for the donation procedure. I am happy about every € or $ donated. But to be clear here it would be better for everyone who wants to donate to ZevenOS to write me an email together with the sum he or she wants to donate. With this kind of procedure we can together accomplish that no money will get wasted if the amount of money whats needed does not come together. (and I have to trust everyone who sends an mail that he will pay the money he offered)