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."

Comments

Re:This is nice but is it needed?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? That is like saying "We already have enough music, and I like it some of it, do we really need people to release new music." What damage does releasing more code as open do? If you think it is poorly written, don't use it, but by all means, don't discourage it from being released.

this is wonderful news, but....

[jfroebe]

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

Re:I wonder...

[jfroebe]

if they contain a great deal of win32 specific code, then a while. if little or no win32 specific code, then a few weeks after release.

jason

good VB alternative

[exhilaration]

I think this would provide the open source community with a good alternative to VB.

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.

Not such great news

[uradu]

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).

Random thoughts (off-topic)

[stikves]

I know this is offtopic, but I have somethings to say as a (former) Pascal user.

Pascal is good in some areas:

• Pascal is very "neat" (except for pointer syntax, which has been fixed in ObjectPascal/Delphi).
  
• It's fast, especially in development time.
  
• It's well known and it had been used widely.
  
• thus, there is alreasy too much source code and binary components readily available (anybody remembers SWAG?).
  
• It's strongly typed (not an advantage for evertone, though).
  
• It's object oriented and has a very nice syntax (compare and avarage MFC code with a Delphi one and see).
  
• It's portable (thanks to GNU Pascal and FreePascal, the latter is much better).
  
• There are already a very sufficient library support for FreePascal (if anything is missing, you can import C libraries easily).
  
• It's good for database programming (i do not know why, but some vendors used to mix SQL in Pascal or vice versa).
  
  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...
  
  
  • mod_pascal: OO programming for Apache, with use of existing data access and XML objects.
    
  • server console: anybody remembers Netware console? Instead of the regular shell, we can start the servers in a special console application, probably using TurboVision or similar.
    
  • gui applications: Delphi is a very nice and rapid way to deploy GUIs, with Kylix and lazarus, we can start a gui movement (especailly frontends to various Linux software), until mono is ready.
    
  • marketing: Kylix is there, but not much used. Why not advertise it as a movement path for developers (MFC -> VCL -> CLX -> Linux).
    
  
  
  But I guess we need to finish lazarus first :)

No Turbo Pascal DOS libaries?

[Stonehead]

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?

OSS kills?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Why there's no Linux Pascal Development

[Junks Jerzey]

The reason why you don't see more Pascal development, at least in Unix world is probably this:

Wow, the close-mindedness of that piece is wonderfully hilarious! I'm getting tired of seeing Kernighan's paper cited. Of *course* the developer of a competing language doesn't like his competition!