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TurboPower's Delphi Components Going Open
Luiz Bucci writes "According to the company web site, TurboPower Software announces their immediate withdrawal from the retail component and developer tools market. As part of the move, TurboPower announces its intention to release their award winning component libraries as open source to the maximum extent possible.
The resulting open source projects will be hosted on SourceForge." (SourceForge and Slashdot are both part of VA Software). TurboPower's libraries cover "compression, serial communication, faxing, Internet communication, scheduling, data entry, encryption, and XML manipulation."
This is a great win for the free software community!
Oh and FP!
I like to see more sour e being opened but do we need this? Aren't there better things out there that are already open source?
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
How popular is delphi? I hear about it occasionally but never have really seen any evidence of it being used much..
Also, any decent samples of what it looks like, or tutorials? Just curious..
As a Turbo Pascal and now Delphi developer, I have used TurboPower components off and on for many moons.
I hate it that they are leaving the retail scene, but I am glad that they are leaving behind one of the best libraries Turbo Pascal/Delphi ever had.
My hat's off to them for this bold move. Now if we could just get an open-source Delphi-compliant compiler on Linux, I'd be happy. Yeah Free Pascal is pretty good; I use it, but it is not yet up to the level of Delphi under Windows in terms of features and libraries.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Many of the components may be developed using licensed code from other companies and/or covered under 3rd party patents.
Before we open up the champagne, let's see just how many of the components will be in a usable form for new development.
jason
No one has seen what you have seen, and until that happens, we're all going to think that you're nuts. - Jack O'Neil
How long before we see some Kylix versions around?
I still use delphi after initially working on a large project with it about 6 years ago.
I still find it to be an exellent tool for whipping up small windowed apps for my own personal use. I find it to be fast and stable, and object pascal is a very nice language. As well, there is a large community of developers and open source code out there.
Delphi does have a bit of a 'cult' following. The largest user base, as far as I am aware, is in Russia.
All of the Russian developers at work love it, and they can't understand why we don't use Delphi (instead of the company mandated J2EE web-app architechture) to write small apps that only have a handful of users.
Are these usable with GNU Pascal or Free Pascal?
I don't use Delphi, never have, nor do I plan to, but I'll welcome any product that gives further credibility to open source and free software. And I'll applaud any company that takes a product open source - it takes a lot of guts to release the code to a product that might be supporting your company.
Or Bill could steal them all, put bugs in them, and call it Longhorn.
Or linux guys could eat pizza, and watch Farscape.
Deep thoughts for a slow night..
If Delphi were the 800 pound gorilla of development tools, fine, the more companies open their products, the better. But as things are, the last thing Delphi needs is major component vendors throwing in the towel. It's sad because Delphi offers one of the few sane and productive alternatives to Microsoft's painful tools and frameworks (.NET shows promise but isn't there yet in terms of maturity and widespread use).
Turbopower has always been uncoventional in its approach, and opensourcing their stuff, rather than taking it down with them, is a clear example of this. Their libraries are extremely useful, very professionally done, well documented and very stable.
;).
If they work well under Kylix, then this is an unbelievable bonanza for many Delphi/Kylix developers. If opensourcing them makes it easier to port them to be usable under FreePascal, then hallelujah!
I have been a Turbopower customer since the days of Kim Kokonnen's DOS TSR libs back in the 80s.
These guys really redefined the concept of customer service then - supporting a newbie programmer like me in Bangalore, India via Compuserve and mail was no joke, but they did it, and they did it well. Would you believe a small company today mailing huge amount of support material to a one-off customer on the other side of the world, at their own cost?
I was able to build products that earned me a tremendous amount of money in those days, and wouldn't have been able to do so had they not supported me the way they did.
I moved away from the DOS/Windows platform in the 90s after Linux came onto the scene, and ceased being a developer by the mid-90s (I am "just" a user now
But I do know whom to thank for my start - that would be Kim, Terry, Julian and the entire bunch of folks at Turbopower.
I am sad to see Turbopower "go away", but at the same time, I am glad to see that they are at least taking a stab at "immortality" by opensourcing their work.
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
Exactly right, first poster. TurboPower makes excellent software.
This may be a problem if you are writing code for public distribution or are a GPL zealot...
I don't care about the license structure at all, I will check their libraries out because it is the product of someone else's hard work, and I may learn something from it. Maybe not everyone cares about licensing issues, but care that the code is opened out of pure intellectual curiosity.
My champagne is already uncorked, and many thanks to TurboPower, regardless of the minor details. I for one am grateful.
Pascal is good in some areas:
However something is missing (except for A^[13] syntax): the applications. There are too many tools (IDEs, RAD tools, libraries). There are many DOS and Windows apps, but it's not used in Linux, yet.
And here some ideas for using pascal...
But I guess we need to finish lazarus first
Oh boy open source Delphi code. The few people still using Delphi better grab the code fast before all the 3rd parties TurboPower licensed code from crack down. How usefull is the code that's left its Delphi not Pascal. Pascal doesn't support Borland VCL and the weirds things Delphi does to work. Like virturl constructors, invisible windows, hidden application that spawns user application. Yes this is a big annoucement.
Yawn....
PGP 8.0 has source open, but I can't modify/redistribute etc. Even Microsofts "Shared Source" is letting somebody view the source. Doesn't mean that they can or will release it under BSD/GPL or similar licence. While this company is out of business, doesn't mean whoever they licence stuff from are, and think they could still make a profit of it.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It has been a long time since I have dealt with them, but TurboPower software has been one of the best software companies I have ever seen. They have a history of making sensible decisions about what to program and how to program it.
I would very much like to have the source code to the free TPE, TurboPowered Editor. This was an excellent DOS editor. There may be Windows versions. If there is only a DOS version, I would plan to make a GUI version. It would be a great start on some HTML processing tools. I would be glad to act as coordinator for a SourceForge entry of the code. I still use the DOS TPE for some text manipulation purposes. Thanks, TurboPower, for the great software.
I tried to send them email, and got this response: "TurboPower has recently announced its withdrawal from the component library and developer tools market." They seem to be going out of business more completely than the story suggested. I read the story as them going out of the retail business, but I thought that there were wholesale ways of selling their products that they would continue. I guess not.
They were among the best a decade ago. They put numerous competitors out of business with their high quality, good support, good performance, and fairly decent design. Last I fought with them, not quite so good. They had evidently turned over staff, had expanded product line, and had been somewhat outdone by some competitors. When I called them with a bug report that one of their components was just about worthless, they no longer said that they would fix things ASAP and that a fixed download would be out soon; they said that it's a bug and that I should try one of their other components that provided something similar. So, I'm not surprised that they are giving it up. There is a steady stream of Delphi products coming out of Russia that must make life miserable for anyone in this market in the US. But with Turbo Power's components as a starter and more eyes looking at the code, the Russians might now have serious competition again.
I've seen two web services demos. One by a Borland guy using Delphi 6 when that was new (a little over a year ago IIRC) and the other by an MS guy using C# about 2 months ago. The Borland guy put together things that worked and did it quickly and impressively. The MS master kept fooling with his own equipment, groping to figure out how to change the font so the audience could see the demo. He couldn't. The demos went downhill from there. He couldn't accomplish more than a third of diddly compared to the Borland guy.
Turbo Power web site says Mozilla license, v 1.1 will apply. Is that good enough?
I didn't think so.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Is this the natural cycle of year(holidays and all) or is technology slowing down? I haven't heard anything terribly interesting the last couple months and wonder what the next big thing is. Have we created most of the infrastructure need to fulfill most our computing needs and has the interesting development moved to smaller implementations of technology that don't affect the majority(business applications)? I hope not, but things have been a little dull lately. I guess a better question is what technology is needed or wanted to make our lives better?
Your memory may vary of course.
Yes, it's 2003 and time to jump on this thing called OPEN SOURCE!
Seriously, it's very, very later to do this. This is "Open Source as a Waste Disposal Mechanism".
Few companies dare to use Free/Open Source Software as a development tool, but those that do, and do it well, find it is a very satisfying way of getting software into more hands and making it better. MySQL, Berkeley DB, and there are many other examples.
For small-to-medium sized software houses there seems little alternative. GPL the damn stuff, and make an alternative license for commercial use. You will get the best of both markets: FOSS developers willing to stress test your work, and commercial developers paying for support.
There should be a catagory label for this kind of after-the-fact FOSS release: "Deadware", or maybe "FOSS-pit Software".
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
There's historical precedent for gambling companies pushing the state of the art in computing. Some of the earliest work in commercial computers was funded by American Totalizator, the company that built racetrack betting systems.
(reference) Now, since you were honest enough to admit you like Pascal, I'll be fair and admit that this position I've listed above is very, very old. It may be outdated now. Or maybe it isn't. I don't know.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
I was a Delphi developer for about 4 years and during this time, I have used several TP products and have found them to be very well developed and easy to use.
I am sad to see them go. I wish all the people involved with TurboPower the very best in whatever venture they get into now.
It seems that - notwithstanding the release of Kylix - not so many people around here are familiar with the Delphi scene. A feature that has distinguished it from its Microsoft competitors is that it is very easy to write good object-oriented components for it. Partly because of this and partly because there is a good 'Delphi scene', for many years there have been large numbers of free Pascal libraries and componenets on the Web. You'll find many of them catalogued on sites like the Polish Delphi Super Page and the Russian Torry's Delphi Pages, as well as the inevitable SourceForge.
In this environment, all software houses that make Delphi components have struggled to make money. Only the very best have survived - who is going to pay money for a slightly dodgy replacement tree control when the slickest, fastest one available is an Open Source freebie?
TurboPower was originally the most innovative of companies, and even if it had lost its way a bit in recent times its passing as a Delphi component vendor is an occasion for regret. You'll find any number of free Delphi libraries for doing serial comms; I suspect that only TurboPower's includes a complete terminal emulator with its own scripting language, and only TurboPower's that includes a fully-fledged fax modem driver complete with all the very tedious stuff to encode and decode Fax TIFF files. All this conscientiously and beautifully documented. There are many other examples of excellence in TurboPower's large range.
I don't claim there is any reason why all this shouldn't have evolved in an Open Source environment. But AFAIK it hasn't. If the success of Delphi as a tool for Open Source development means that companies such as TurboPower can no longer survive, then I think long term all Delphi (and Kylix) programmers will be much the poorer for it.
Although I live too far from the US, it's bad new to hear that another IT company is going on "shutdown -h now".
so are a lot of excellent apps. Props to the Turbo peeps for this gift.
From the Shutdown FAQ, in my own words: "We feel that most of the other DOS products will not have sufficient demand to successfully support an open-source project."
Well, Borland already released the Turbo Pascal 5.5 binaries. I have used those to teach children programming on their own DOS boxes. Turbo Power had great library releases for every Turbo Pascal DOS version, wouldn't those be interesting for people who are still working with these?
I honestly have to admit that - in spite of my fandom for all Turbo Pascal DOS stuff - I have no idea, is GNU Pascal or Free Pascal under Unix any good? I have succesfully got RHIDE working after some compiling hassles, but not really tried it with lots of code. How portable is my old DOS stuff? Can I use FreePascal to let children play with it under Linux in my place, and under DOS at their home?
Sorry, I had to get your attention somehow.
These guys DO NOT Have to do this, but they are, so I think it would be a very nice thing if we really so them our appreciation and also condolances as they exit the market. Remeber, they are shutting down for whatever reason and for them to put in the extra effort to give to the community at their own expense, at a possible time of sorrow for them, is something that should be shown repect and thanks from the open source community.
Just my 2 cents
auto262814@hushmail.com
Gracefully exit and leave your customers less unhappy than they otherwise would have been.
Put identity in the browser.
Delphi is THE or at last one of the more common tools here in Brazil.
Today are lots of free and open source libs for Delphi like Project Jedi and RxLIB, Torry
And Borland has incresling stuffing Delphi with lots of new components in any new version they released.
Then, looking at they products, I think they do this because for a Delphi developer, makes no more sense to buy components and libs if there are so many freely available.
For Delphi users, Is this a good or a bad news?
I know another small software company thinking similarly. Recent economic conditions have hurt the business, they are spending their time on other efforts, and passing the product on to the open source community is a good way to minimize the screwing of their old customers. The Mozilla license also gives them some options to re-enter some day.
So it's a good thing in the sense that the products won't necessarily die, but not a good sign of things in general.
Delphi is the fastest GUI building programming language out ther, simply because most of the alternatives suck, microsofts MFC classes is horrible to look at because they are mixed together in a big pile of s... whereas Delphi's class hierachy works beautifully. Visual basic's code is also ugly and the programming language is only suited for small apps.
Trolltech's QT library for c++ cross platform however is also very nice for building GUI's.
So there is absolutely no reasonable logic behind Microsofts compilers succes, it is one of them stories where the most inferior technology wins. But kudos to the Russians who have embraced a technology that actually gives the best result, instead of just jumping on the bandwagon that all the other companies take...
So here's the question, for those of us without a big head for licenses... and I'm sure there's more than a few of us out there in this prediciment
I work on a consulting project that uses Async for Builder that is extremely closed source, i.e. in the code there exists a password routine that would allow one to walk up to any of a certain make of skid steer loader and drive away with it without a key, just by looking at it and with no special tools!!! So, there is a -5% chance of this going OS. There's also dozens of little builder and delphi apps running around that use Async as well.
If I want to switch to the *NEWEST* Async available when it comes out, does that mean I would have to release the source?
----- - The beatings will continue until morale improves
Of course, we'll all take any announcement of the open-sourcing of useful software as good news. However, I hope a trend doesn't develop where OSS becomes known as "what happens to software when companies die." I'd rather see software open-sourced in a profitable way as opposed to the "we're pulling out of the market so why the hell not" way that is becoming more and more common.
VB was introduced in 1991. Delphi in early 1995. In very many ways, you could say that the visual design of Delphi was a rip off of VB. That's not to say that Delphi wasn't a huge improvement over VB.
Kylix Open Edition is only licensed for the creation of GNU GPL programs. The TurboPower components will be released under the MPL.
Unless the TurboPower components are dual licensed under a GPL-compatible license, they will not be of much use with Kylix Open Edition.
No this is a dead/dying company saying to those who supported their efforts over the years "here have these fruits of our labor". If there is no chance of continued revenue from a large base of well developed code then why not release it into the world? Sure a large amount of the code will never be touched again, but if even a small amount of it goes on to save someone work some day then the entire world has just become a little tiny bit more effecient. When there is no other use for code I think it is great to release it to be free forever more. What is the cost of this "deadware", oh yeah nothing more than the space to save it on some hdd's and the bandwidth to transmit it to anyone that wants it, essentially free.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I've been wondering about that all night (heard about it at my Borland developers group meeting last night). Are they moving into consulting or just giving up all together?
.NET right now. Kind of an adopt or die mentality. Luckely the next version of Delphi will come with a C# compiler.
They do have wonderful tool, no doubt there. It would be a bad omen if they are closing shop altogether.
Personally, I think a lot of the Delphi Component developer groups are moving to
Bad User. No biscuit!
to another firm goes bust.... at least in the software market.
..use Delphi. I did. And so managed to finish my thesis in time, etc.
Tried VB, but there are a lot of non-sense there. With Delphi everything is as it should.
Can't really explain it, but if you have done programming for years, I think you'll have an idea what I said.
Also I was very disappointed with this RAD buzzword.
Delphi is _the_ product that returned my faith in it.
Not to mention:
# Produces very lean executables
# Very stable - it's very hard to code when the IDE keeps on crashing on you
# I actually found accessing Win32 API enjoyable with it.
# etc.
I have to wonder if TurboPower releasing their tools as Open Source is more an act of sticking it to TurboPower's competitors than anything else.
Obviously, TurboPower could have sold their tools to one of their competitors but chose not to do so. At the same time, TurboPower's competitors who offer similar libraries will see their marketshare diminish (and their programmers get layed off) as people learn about "free" alternatives.
It seems to me that a large percentage of open source projects are open source because:
1) The project would not be capable of supporting itself otherwise.
2) It is a way for a company who is on their last legs to stick it to their competitors before going under. Saying in effect: "If we can't compete effectively, then you are not going to be able too."
Finally, it is sad to me to see TurboPower folding (or changing focus). TurboPower has been a key player in the Borland tools market for a very long time. I have never seen a bad comment about TurboPower among the Borland tools users which was most likely due to TurboPower's superior customer service. To see TurboPower folding makes me wonder what the future is for the tools market(s).
I haven't seen this mentioned, but I asked about what license they were relasing the code under. It will be the Mozilla 1.1 license. Yay!
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;
And the Pascal RAD [under development]:
http://lazarus.freepascal.org
Almost all the criticisms offered by Ritchie were about the original Pascal, not the improved object oriented pascal that is used by Delphi. Almost all the looping, escaping, breaking, pointers and other features that a C programmer would expect in C can be done just as well with Delphi (Object Oriented Pascal). Object Oriented Pascal is to Pascal what C++ is to C, though it fixed some of the fundamental shortcomings of the language in the process where C++ did not (and did not need to by and large). The syntax may look different, but it's really very very similar to C and C++ these days. While I personally prefer C's somewhat more terse syntax, I really cannot say I miss much. I've been able to port back and forth without any real difficulty. If you do almost any sort of Windows application development and haven't tried Delphi, then you really are missing out. I would assert that Delphi could replace VC++ for most applications but for its relative lack of critical mass. This makes it relatively undesirable for large scale projects. Where it really makes up for the lack of critical mass, i.e., fewer Delphi programmers, is though its RAD features and components and other advantages (which are less desirable on large ones). It makes it worthwile in many cases for C and C++ programmers to learn Delphi (it's not hard if you come from that background) in smaller shops where rapid turn around time is needed. ...Yeah, it can be a slight pain working directly with the windows (not always/usually necessary) and other C/C++ APIs because it's non-native, but it does work well.
Pascal was strict. Borland broke the locks when they produced Turbo Pascal (20 years or so ago). They put in an ABSOLUTE directive that let you make variables share storage, so that you could interpret the same memory in different ways. They put in fast variable length strings. They put in a MOVE intstruction so that you could flop arbitrary bytes around wherever you wanted to. They put in raw access to ports and memory addresses and interrupts and all the low memory data in DOS. With these changes, programmers loved Turbo Pascal, and it sold a many times more copies than anything else for programmers had ever sold.
This is great news for Microsoft.
It implies that they no longer will be supporting Borland and are moving 100% with Microsoft.
Of course we'll get some neat stuff that we can port to kylix but this this is bad news for Borland and all of us who don't like Microsoft.
Get your facts straight
Microsoft settled out of court for more than $150 millions after Borland sued them for copying them.
Microsoft would not have paid such an amount if they were innocent.
SourceForge and Slashdot are both part of VA Software
I disagree with you assertion that this is deadware, this stuff is in use all over the place and I'm sure the people who use it appreciate the newfound ability to maintain this software by themselves or with the help of other interested individuals. In particular when new versions of Delphi come out, there's a chance that the more popular components get ported. As for the company, it seems to be refocusing its effort because it considers that it no longer can make money selling Delphi tools. they ae not dead either.
Wow. Since I made my original post, I've been modded down once and had various disagreements posted below. Many of those people may not have read all the way down to the bottom where I said:
That means that, what I was doing was simply posting a piece of "established wisdom". It is my policy to always take anything that's "established wisdom" with a grain of salt. I was simply posting the standard arguement. I was not trying to troll, and I was not trying to start a flame ware. It's just, this person said a certain thing and there's this well-established standard argument against it. So I posted it. I made sure to mention that I wasn't sure if I agreed with it or not.The ironic thing is, I feel that, to some extent, all the posters saying Pascal's OK, have convinced me that it isn't OK.
Everyone saying that Standard Pascal sucked but that Delphi Pascal is great or Object Pascal is great should focus attention here:
And there it is. The only thing that makes it okay is if the extended Pascals are standard enough now. If they're wide-spread enough. Are they? I guess from the arguments and flame-like posts, perhaps they are. I don't know. But is there anything that Pascal can do that other languages can't?Furry cows moo and decompress.
Just a thought...and another reason to open source the libraries.
After IBM swallowed Rational, the rumour mills had Microsoft buying Borland.
-Mike
Turbopower products, for a LONG time, have made the best tools I have ever seen, regardless of language. I have used them for over ten years, and hearily applaud their decision. They are where it's at.
Also, their products have always had a singular attribute.. it is not proprietary! Full source comes with purchase, for only a couple hundred dollars or so, and you get free updates till the next major release. THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AN OPEN SOURCE COMPANY. Now, you guys come along with unwashed ears and throw your petty stones at it and them, like they are nothing's because YOU are simply unaware.
I see this at my own linux club meetings too often, these youngsters are arrogant about anything outside their interest or awareness. Time to become human, people, times are a-changin'.
I have download the version 4.06 from sourceforge, but can't compile in Delphi 7
who have met this problem?