Does the use of present perfect continuous with a time reference in the past imply an intention to finish, and if yes, how to avoid it?

I guess the question sounds a bit intimidating, but the real-life example I am referring to should be easy for a native speaker.

I am proofreading, or rather copy editing, a research paper intended for an international conference. Neither me nor my co worker who wrote it is a native English speaker. I managed to set lots of grammar straight, but there is a sentence I find extremely tricky.

She writes "The framework is developed since about eight years". As far as I can tell, the grammatically correct form of this sentence is "The framework has been in development for about eight years".

To me, this sounds as if we want the framework to be finished at some point, and it has taken so terribly long to develop and is not yet finished. We don't want to make such an impression, as this is an ongoing project which already has finalized, usable versions, but it is also still being developed because we are continuously improving it and expanding it.

Is my interpretation correct, or am I just confused by some similar structure in some other language? And if it is correct, how can I change the wording (without making it significantly longer) so it reads just as the mentioning of the starting point of a process expected to continue for an indeterminable length of time in the future?

Your interpretation is correct--the sentence as currently worded seems to imply that the framework is still unfinished. (However, your corrected version has the advantage of being grammatically correct, which the original wasn't.)

I might try a completely different rewording: Development of the framework has been ongoing for about eight years. If you need to be explicit about the fact that you've already released, you could add something like In this time there have been N stable public releases, which can be downloaded from http://example.com.