by SOTE » 05 Sep 2019, 06:11
After playing with Embarcadero Delphi Community Edition and looking at how that company has handled Delphi (some say mishandled), I do think their strategy is highly flawed. With many companies, their greed has gotten in the way, where they "can't see the forest from the trees". Delphi is still a very good product, that allows for cross-platform application development. But it's way, way too expensive for a lot of the potential users. Particularly for the young, hobbyist, and independent software developers. This means Embarcadero has been "locking out" new developers and a bigger core base. This is why many think Delphi has died, and by incorrect association, think Pascal has died along with it. Key point is that Delphi and Pascal/Object Pascal aren't the same thing.
For example, depending on which software product, Delphi can cost from around $1,500 to $3,000 dollars (and up depending on options). While a decent sized company with multiple developers can handle such an expense, most young individuals can't or won't pay such a cost. Especially when they can freely download the Lazarus IDE (Free Pascal), which can also import Delphi projects. Though not as capable as Delphi, still quite good. With its only truly glaring weakness is lacking support for building apps on iOS/iPhones (though it can do macOS and Android).
If Embarcadero had done their math properly and not been so greedy. The Delphi Community Edition should remain free as long as total sales revenue for created applications doesn't reach at least $10,000 dollars, not $5,000 dollars. Taxes often eat around 30% of sales revenue. Which could leave $7,000 or so left. And depending on which Delphi product and the reseller they get it from, they could be laying out $2,000 dollars or so. You at least leave the independent software developer with some money in their pocket. With the limit being $5,000 dollars, after 30% cut by taxes, that's $3,500 left. Which will be eaten up significantly paying for Delphi.
And the amount of developers should arguably have been lowered to 3, instead of 5. It's probably too late to change that now, but some more thought should have been done. Because a company that can afford at least 3 software developers, is one that has some money. Programmers/Developers salaries are at least $85,000 US dollars (can be much higher depending on area and experience). Multiply that by 3 (or 5), and that company should be able to handle buying Delphi. Where that's not the case for young people that haven't graduated from high school or college, or non/wannabe programmers looking to get started that aren't making that kind of salary.
Embarcadero should be better at math, more practical, and less blinded by greediness. In addition the list of competitive programming languages and their abilities is rapidly increasing. There is Swift by Apple (slowly gaining a foothold in Windows), Dart by Google (used in Flutter and possibly their replacement OS for Android), Red, C# going cross-platform by Microsoft (and thanks to Xamarin), various new JavaScript solutions, etc... And the Lazarus IDE and Free Pascal keep slowly getting better. All these solutions are mostly free and/or open-source.
The Delphi Community Edition was definitely a step in the right direction (though it came out a bit late in the game), but if Delphi and Embarcadero want to stay relevant, they need to improve the terms of usage even more, to grow a bigger base of users.
Update:
If your Community Edition license expires (1 year), you will have to uninstall, download a new version, then install that. Which will give you another 1 year license. There might also be some hacks to continue using the existing version past 1 year, but uninstall and re-install updated version is simple enough.
Delphi Community Edition's revenue restrictions do have some enforcement gray areas, that I have seen some debates about. Particularly for free software where the author gets donations, as how Embarcadero can track such is not clear. However, as Lazarus has no such restrictions, not sure why a Pascal programmer would want to go down that road for Windows, Linux, or Mac.
Delphi Community Edition doesn't have support for Linux (yet), though Delphi RAD (paid version) does. Not clear when it will or if it will ever be added to the Community Edition. Lazarus IDE w/ Free Pascal does support Linux. These IDEs have varying levels of support and cross-compiling capability for different OSes, along with their slightly different flavors of Object Pascal.
After playing with Embarcadero Delphi Community Edition and looking at how that company has handled Delphi (some say mishandled), I do think their strategy is highly flawed. With many companies, their [u]greed[/u] has gotten in the way, where they "can't see the forest from the trees". Delphi is still a [u]very good product[/u], that allows for cross-platform application development. But it's way, way too expensive for a lot of the potential users. Particularly for the young, hobbyist, and independent software developers. This means Embarcadero has been "locking out" new developers and a bigger [u]core base[/u]. This is why many think Delphi has died, and by incorrect association, think Pascal has died along with it. Key point is that Delphi and Pascal/Object Pascal aren't the same thing.
For example, depending on which software product, Delphi can cost from around $1,500 to $3,000 dollars (and up depending on options). While a decent sized company with multiple developers can handle such an expense, most young individuals can't or won't pay such a cost. Especially when they can freely download the Lazarus IDE (Free Pascal), which can also import Delphi projects. Though not as capable as Delphi, still quite good. With its only truly glaring weakness is lacking support for building apps on iOS/iPhones (though it can do macOS and Android).
If Embarcadero had done their math properly and not been so greedy. The Delphi Community Edition should remain free as long as total sales revenue for created applications doesn't reach at least [u]$10,000 dollars[/u], not $5,000 dollars. Taxes often eat around 30% of sales revenue. Which could leave $7,000 or so left. And depending on which Delphi product and the reseller they get it from, they could be laying out $2,000 dollars or so. You at least leave the independent software developer with some money in their pocket. With the limit being $5,000 dollars, after 30% cut by taxes, that's $3,500 left. Which will be eaten up significantly paying for Delphi.
And the amount of developers should arguably have been lowered to 3, instead of 5. It's probably too late to change that now, but some more thought should have been done. Because a company that can afford at least 3 software developers, is one that has some money. Programmers/Developers salaries are at least $85,000 US dollars (can be much higher depending on area and experience). Multiply that by 3 (or 5), and that company should be able to handle buying Delphi. Where that's [u]not the case[/u] for young people that haven't graduated from high school or college, or non/wannabe programmers looking to get started that aren't making that kind of salary.
Embarcadero should be better at math, more practical, and less blinded by greediness. In addition the list of competitive programming languages and their abilities is rapidly increasing. There is Swift by Apple (slowly gaining a foothold in Windows), Dart by Google (used in Flutter and possibly their replacement OS for Android), Red, C# going cross-platform by Microsoft (and thanks to Xamarin), various new JavaScript solutions, etc... And the Lazarus IDE and Free Pascal keep slowly getting better. All these solutions are mostly free and/or open-source.
The Delphi Community Edition was definitely a step in the right direction (though it came out a bit late in the game), but if Delphi and Embarcadero want to stay relevant, they need to improve the terms of usage even more, to grow a bigger base of users.
Update:
If your Community Edition license expires (1 year), you will have to uninstall, download a new version, then install that. Which will give you another 1 year license. There might also be some hacks to continue using the existing version past 1 year, but uninstall and re-install updated version is simple enough.
Delphi Community Edition's revenue restrictions do have some enforcement gray areas, that I have seen some debates about. Particularly for free software where the author gets donations, as how Embarcadero can track such is not clear. However, as Lazarus has no such restrictions, not sure why a Pascal programmer would want to go down that road for Windows, Linux, or Mac.
Delphi Community Edition doesn't have support for Linux (yet), though Delphi RAD (paid version) does. Not clear when it will or if it will ever be added to the Community Edition. Lazarus IDE w/ Free Pascal does support Linux. These IDEs have varying levels of support and cross-compiling capability for different OSes, along with their slightly different flavors of Object Pascal.