Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
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.
Given the way TurboPower ships most of it's components, I'd actually think this will not be much of a problem.
Pretty much when you bought a license of one of their components (such as AsyncPro), you got the source. One of my friends found a few bugs in AsyncPro, worked out how to fix them, and then alerted TurboPower about the bug and the fix. So the source has previously had a number of eyes outside of TurboPower actually reviewing it.
Plus (as I mention elsewhere) TurboPower have already got quite a number of their components working under Kylix, and seem pretty clueful on the whole. They seemed to have an attitude of "well, we need this, so lets write it ourselves!" rather than always resorting to high level API's or 3rd party modules.
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
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.
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.