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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!!
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.
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
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