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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!!
The Linux crowd has a natural dislike for products that don't work well and cost money. We've little issues with paying money for things that work right. Kylix was a feeble attempt on Borland's part, done far, far too late to make any difference in things.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
At the time of the release it was not like there was much potential of a big revenue stream from the nix crowd to begin with. Who was the target audience? Lone developers that would have used it to build "free" apps. couldn't afford it, and corporate dev. shops that were using nix were only using it on the back end. So at best you are building middle tier or web services, both of which were already well supported by other languages/platforms for nix.
.NET train because that was where the money "is/was" but now instead of innovating, they play catch up for the privilege of being dependent on someone else's technology.
There were functional problems as well. Making Delphi/CBuilder developers not use the controls and code base for win32 but requiring the use of CLX and custom libs for Kylix portability. An unstable initial IDE release. To name a few. Developers that work in Delphi or CBuilder all the time think in those languages, and know all the details (hidden features/bugs) of the controls they use. The compiler/linker should have taken care of the different platforms. Like compiler options that determine if you are compiling against win32 or nix. Making the developers try and remember all the differences is the same as making them learn a new language. Thats just dumb, and if there is one thing developers tend not to be it's dumb.
Now if you come forward to today where Desktop nix is starting to make headway. What would be really interesting is if there were a stable version of Kylix that let you use your Delphi or CBuilder code, (not CLX and custom libraries for nix.) and the compiler/linker took care of the platform specifics. Price it around the same as the Turbos. You have a good viable product. ["Of course if wishes were horses we would all be eating steak"]
I don't think Borland/CodeGear has the courage to do this. Because while the website says "Where developers matter" what it really means is "Where developers pocketbooks matter". Just look at the sad state of the BDS products. Borland hopped on the
I could rail all day on mistakes Borland made, but as they say hindsight is 20/20. Let's not focus on the past but look forward to the future and all the mistakes they have yet to make.
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.
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