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Borland/Codegear Doesn't Plan to Revive Kylix
An anonymous reader writes "Borland's tools spinoff, CodeGear, is laying plans to revive the classic developer products — but Kylix is staying dead, the CEO says. "I hear lots of discussions about Kylix, but I didn't see lots of revenue in my reports about Kylix," he told CRN."
Kylix is (was) Delphi and C++ Builder for Linux/i386. There were three versions and I only ever used Kylix 3 with the Delphi personality. That one was fine. Stable, useful, and the price also was right: It only cost me 19 Euros. I can't comment on the C++ personality or Kylix 1 and 2. I guess they must have been pretty awful for Kylix getting such a bad reputation.
Well I'll admit to thinking it was a great idea when it got started. Back in the late 90s, there were polls about which applications people wanted for Linux. Two consistently topped the list: Quicken/Quickbooks and Delphi.
When they first announced its availability, at a price of a whopping $999 for the non-enterprise version, I immediately realized they didn't have a clue. No wonder almost no one bought it. When they announced that the price had dropped to $200, I ordered a copy immediately. It was nice, and I enjoyed playing with it, but it was somewhat buggy.
I also ordered the upgrade to Kylix 2. It had definite improvements, but it was still rather inconsistent, with a Winelib IDE, an infernal Motif based help system, and producing Qt applications. There was a lot of annoyance in the user community that the promised PostgreSQL driver was too long in coming.
When I switched from Red Hat to Gentoo, I never was able to get Kylix installed correctly. I haven't used it since.
I still believe there could be a market for this kind of tool -- if the company producing it actually came through with a great product that could produce apps for multiple platforms with minimal changes. Looks like Java or Python (take your pick) is the closest we're gonna get.
Over the years, I have bought more than 2 dozen commercial apps, including vmware (no longer since Xen does it all for me). In addition, for over a decade, I bought Redhat and/or Mandrake. Why? Because all of these products were good and had great customer support. Why would I not buy Kylix? The cost was too high for a lousy product. The simple fact is, that kdevelop is better than kylix was, so I stayed with it. If kylix had offered more (support, libraries, and liberty free code) at a low price, I would have bought it and it would have been used in 2 different start-ups. But they put out a horrible product and did not consider what the bar was that they had to jump over. And yes, I did try multiple kylixes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I also saw Delphi going off course. I'm still using Delphi 5. It does what I want and Later versions only seemed to add things I don't really care about.
As for making Delphi open source...
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/
give it a go.
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.