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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."
When Borland was investigating if Kylix was a viable product they did a poll betweenBorlands users. The poll gave an incredible 94 (or something similar) percents of the votes with people entusiasthically screaming: "Yes, we will get Kylix" "Cool, now I can code for Linuzzz". When the product was done and out there, only some miserable number of copies were sold. That was one of the problems: the Linuzzz crowd has a natural dislike for non-free products.
Borland (maybe Inprise back then) made then a move: made it free, but only if the code produced with Kylix would be GPL. Then the user base rised kind of, but many Windows coders realised that linuzz is not Windows and the dependence nightmare began. Borland was obligated to support only 2 distros (IIRC) because they could not guarantee that the rest of the distros would have the needed dependences.
Add to this that the IDE crashed badly, and here we have. A big flop.
Another problem was that VCL applications were no more, and you must use CLX which was somekind of a bastard for a Delphi user....Oh well....
There is actually a very interesting project that allowed programming in Windows with Delphi but deploying in Linux in a semiautomatical way... Forgot the name of the project but it was kind of officially supported by Borland.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
C# is not "native Windows app", it's .NET app. :) What library? MFC?
Ruby - what library gives you native windows UI (like, with XP themes, advanced Windows controls etc, for example?).
C++ - of course
Fairly certain that from MS's point of view, .Net apps are considered a "native Windows apps". You and I know this isn't necessarily the case in the wild, but I feel like quibbling this morning ;)
Funny this story breaks after I spend all morning getting Delphi 5 to run under WINE, to support a legacy app that was written back when Delphi 1 was an exciting new thing.
Watching Delphi die horribly was sad. Delphi originally did one thing very, very, VERY well - it was a rapid development platform to make GUI apps in Windows very fast, that you could distribute as standalone applications that ran very fast. No VBXes or vbrun.dll. I knew Delphi was doomed when Borland changed the defaults to NOT create a standalone app. "They just don't get it." Then version after version took Delphi away from its mission. Delphi was not going to work as an enterprise database tool, an Active X control construction tool, a .NET language, etc. That wasn't why Delphi faithful liked it. Borland just didn't get what made Delphi great. Plus the price became outrageous with all this "enterprise" nonsense.
So ...
Why not open source Kylix/Delphi? Linux has no real rapid GUI development tool. Let real developers fix whatever is wrong with it. See if anyone uses it. After all, Turbo Pascal is as dead as dead can get.
Kylix was a hacked WINE'd (IIRC) Delphi IDE and compiler that had a brutally hacked Delphi's VCL (component library) named CLX (which was backported to Windows to allow advertising it as a cross-platform thing). It produced binaries for 32-bit x86 CPUs for specific versions of runtimes (libc included) and used QT (not KDE integrated of course) to handle application GUI. It had IMHO an overall crippled Windows version feel.
The first borland product I used was in 1986... I followed them through Borland C++ 3.0, 3.1, 4.0, Delphi 1,2,3, BC++Builder 4, 5. I bought them all. I stopped using them after that as I found the quality seemed to be reducing over the years and the prices were going through the roof, and all the code was 'locked in' to their environment - not just their environment but each specific version of their environment... I tried Kylix and was excited at first, but then I realized that it still locked me in. The real issue is shown by Borland killing Kylix... I am glad I did not base all my code around a system that could so easily be killed off!
The price is not the factor for me, the freedom and guaranteed availability is.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
Kylix had lots of problems. I was one of the many excited when it was offered and became available -- that is until I downloaded and installed it. The out-of-date library requirements (almost from time of release) for installation, the unstable environment that was not responsive or would crash from time-to-time, the wine requirement. Couple that with an extremely expensive price tag.
Borland/Inprise got greedy, plain and simple. They tried to charge a premium price for products on Linux. Had they done any amount of "real" research they would have understand that was not going to fly. I'm not saying there wasn't a market for non-free tools -- I think they could have made some great inroads had the priced and marketed Kylix properly. I remember being highly surprised at the high price of the "enterprise" version. Of course, they also charged a hefty premium for Delphi enterprise as well. I don't recall if Delphi and Kylix were the same price, it seems as though Kylix was noticeably more.
Couple Borland's history of quality software, and an expectation of excellence from their loyal customers, with the quality of Kylix, the looming disaster was obvious. I tried Kylix 1 and Kylix 3. I don't know anything about 2. Kylix 1 always felt like it was more of an alpha or beta release when I used it, not a finished released product. You are not going to win any friends charging a premium price for something like that.
The sad thing is, I have a gut feeling (pure opinion, not backed by hard facts) that the back end of Kylix was probably pretty decent. It was as though they were spending so much time getting the back end compiler part working perfectly that they ran out of time for the IDE and had to take shortcuts to get it out. Kylix may have been a technical marvel on one-hand, but the part that people actually saw and used on a day-to-day basis left a bad impression. Especially for the price.
Instead of learning their lesson and adapting to the market, they blame the Linux market for being unwilling to buy non-free tools or make other excuses. When, in reality, had the product they offered lived up to the expected quality of Borland's products, and been sold at a reasonable price, my guess is they would have been much more successful.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
I wrote some software in Delphi and was excited when Borland (Inprise) announced Kylix. In the end I purchased all the versions of Kylix that they released and none were up to production quality standards. They all had longstanding, known bugs that were never addressed. Eventually, I found the Lazarus project ( http://lazarus.freepascal.org/ ). While the debugging is not up to what I had with delphi, I am able to code in Linux on a project that other developers are developing in Windows. While we have found bugs and limitations, the developers are quick to fix problems that we find and/or suggest better ways to do things. Matt Henley
Borland had some special arrangement with them. Borland also had a percentage of Trolltech shares.
They have been hived off by Borland since there were no buyers.
Borland have already sacked 120 staff in the last month since they are losing millions.
Expect to see them shut down within 18 months.