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Borland C++Builder Revolt

Posted by michael on from the fight-the-man dept.

florescent_beige writes "Developers using Borland's C++Builder RAD tool are in revolt. Borland apparently obsoleted this product one year ago. However, the promised migration path (to be described in a now infamous open letter) never materialized. In a last-ditch effort to convince Borland to support them, users have put together a letter justifying (and begging) for continued support."

6 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Begging is not freedom. by jbn-o · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Poster writes

    [...] In a last-ditch effort to convince Borland to support them, users have put together a letter justifying (and begging) for continued support.

    Slashdot places this story in the "fight-the-man dept.".

    Asking or begging a proprietor to do what you want is not fighting anyone, it's acknowledging that you are not livin in freedom. Placing yourself in a dependant position by not choosing free software to do the job doesn't bode well for leveraging a free market to supply the desired changes or improvements. Ironically, all the customers the letter cites are capable of paying for the support they want. Perhaps these developers should put some money and/or time into getting someone to distribute a free software program that does what they want so they won't be in this position.

    --
    Digital Citizen
    1. Re:Begging is not freedom. by PickyH3D · · Score: 3, Insightful
      What in the hell are you talking about? Free software dies off just like proprietary software.

      If the company (READ FOR MORONS: developers) do not feel like supporting the software, then THEY STOP.

      What does the free market dictate? YOU GO SOMEWHERE ELSE (READ FOR MORONS: take your business somewhere else). Stop acting like you have a damn clue.

      Whether you take your "business" to free software or not is your choice. THAT IS FREEDOM.

      You damn hippies are just tools.

    2. Re:Begging is not freedom. by PickyH3D · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Actually, that scratch the install CD thing isn't always true. I scratched a development CD of a very old version of a piece of software (say, version 3 versus the current version 7) and I wanted the version 3, which I could not find anywhere. The company just gave me it.

      Obviously that's a limited example, but the Open source example also assumes there is a recent mirror and that you are willing to do it. A lot of people actually have jobs, and do not have the time to redevelop/reverse engineer applications for a feature that just should be there, but that does not have to be there (one of those things that makes life a little bit easier).

      Plus, have you looked at many OSS source code recently? I have, and most of them are very poorly documented, especially in terms of commented code (even Apache 2; I was looking at the AliasMatch code).

      The beauty of OSS is that the option is available, but in way too many cases the time it takes to learn a crappy code base is not worth the effort. Look at the Blog implementation, WordPress. It's great if you want exactly what it has to offer. However, if you don't then you have to go searching for where functions are declared and track through the dependencies, not to mention the spaghetti code! I was able to get it to what I wanted, but that's one of those wonderful OSS things that everyone brags about and it is a web.

  2. this is why open source rocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    if a RAD tool is open source then people can put some time on making their RAD tool better and better. Borland here just puts a dead end to a product which seemed to have some followers. Not good for Borland, not good for Borland users. Now opening up the source seems like the right thing to do.

  3. wxPython and Boa Constructor by turgid · · Score: 3, Insightful
    wxPython and Boa Constructor are all well and good, but how do they help C++ developers?

    Perhaps Anjuta would be more use to them in conjuncion with gcc? Here are the features and here is the eye candy.

    Products like C++ Builder are not only fancy IDEs and compilers, but they come with very rich class libraries. If someone has invested years of development time creating applications using these class libraries, thier discontinuation is a disaster if they are to continue to develop their application without rewriting it from scratch using different libraries, or in a whole new language environment.

    --
    Stick Men
  4. Re:Borland dead? I don't think so. by hh1000 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "or tell me about an alternative language I should learn."

    Consider contributing to the Freepascal and Lazarus open source projects.