> The pricing is just out of this wolrd. You get the impression that they try to squeeze every last penny out of their existing user base.
I used to think that about Delphi, various commercial Lisp implementations, etc. But after some time I've changed my view a little.
My change is because I realized that Delphi had its chance, and kept on trying as the chance slipped away. No amount of competitive pricing today is going to make a resurgence of Delphi happen. That door is closed, for all practical purposes.
The alternative is to offer products and support in a sustainable way and given the small number of people using Delphi professionally today, that means charging somewhat hefty amounts. IOW, their target market is business that has Delphi products that are worthwhile to maintain. In order to stay in business and provide service they have shed casual users.
(As much as we can debate about Tiobe and other indexs, is important to note that is still way higher that many will expect, and the flow of information we see in the community is very good, much more than many other hispers options)
The thing is that price is in fact the main problem. This kill the open source ecosystem options around it.
I will totally, like many others (I know, I'm moderator in on of the most important forum in Latin-America) work more for it but without a way to reach a large audience it kill many ideas we have.
Delphi was the most sucesfully opensource but commercial (as, you have the source) with many thirdy-party options. Think like the current React-Components market but maybe larger and years ago.
I think any company that would buy Delphi will agree more with me than with you.
If you're right and companies just can't see that or make it work, can the community do more with Lazarus? I have not played with that so I don't know how good it is.
In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely."
This is it. Management trade a large and healthy ecosystem chasing the rainbows.
This will fail for sure.
---
Lazarus is ok, except that suffer from the same disease of most open source projects: Lack of focus and good funding.
Look at every other Delphi competitor from the time period. Microsoft is giving Visual Studio away to casual users and Visual Basic is now VB.Net. Eclipse and IntelliJ come in free versions. There is no longer a market for a million loyal $100 customers for a programming language and ecosystem. There are too many high-quality free languages, compilers and IDEs to make that business model work anymore.
There's a sort of a hobbyist/professional split. There's a lot of grey area inbetween, but it's easier to reason about it if you think of two markets. One will pay, one won't if there are acceptable free alternatives. But it turns out that there are rather big synergies to be had from both camps using versions of the same tooling. So you have enterprises that are willing to buy pro versions of tools at prices that subsidize the existence of users at the free tier. That's nothing like the old Borland model that the post I was responding to wants Delphi to go back to.
I used to think that about Delphi, various commercial Lisp implementations, etc. But after some time I've changed my view a little.
My change is because I realized that Delphi had its chance, and kept on trying as the chance slipped away. No amount of competitive pricing today is going to make a resurgence of Delphi happen. That door is closed, for all practical purposes.
The alternative is to offer products and support in a sustainable way and given the small number of people using Delphi professionally today, that means charging somewhat hefty amounts. IOW, their target market is business that has Delphi products that are worthwhile to maintain. In order to stay in business and provide service they have shed casual users.