Slashdot Mirror
Borland Linux Developer Survey
Borland is currently running
a poll to test the demand from the Linux community for porting their development tools. What with the Code Warrior folks, and all the IDEs coming around, it's a good signal of interest in the community. As well, Inprise is looking to hire a Seniuor R&D Engineer (for porting Delphi), as well as a Linux Developer Relations Mgr.
On the other hand, the Free software community has done very well for itself in terms of development tools. I can't think of anything we're really lacking that Borland provides. Sure there are somethings but in general, there aren't too many if any development tasks you can't get done already. That leaves me wondering where Delphi, JBuilder, IBM's Visual Age compilers, etc.. all fit in to the linux infrastructure. It provides an attractive option for ISVs who demand support but most OSS/FS projects, if not all, will still use GCC.
I would like to play with Delphi on linux, especially if it can build GTK+ or QT GUIs but I'm not sure I'd shell out the $200 for it and I can't say I know a lot of linux people who would.
Seb writes:
"Now I wonder what their current relationship with InterBase (Inprise?) is."
'borland.com' is a division of Inprise; even before they brought back the name in this *corporate* sense, the *products* still used the old brand. They were and are 'Borland Delphi (etc), from Inprise', only now with an inserted 'from borland.com, a division of'.
The middleware, Entera, Visibroker, and so on, is and was branded Inprise; they reserve the Borland name for the development tools.
And InterBase is, at it has been for years, owned by InterBase Corp. (or Inc, whatever), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Inprise (formerly of Borland).
"As far as I know, InterBase grew out of an independent team of programmers long ago before Borland came to scene. Or am I wrong?"
Yes and no.
Borland acquired InterBase with its buy-up of Ashton-Tate; you know, the guys behind dBase? It was a Borland product for a while, but got spun out into its own subsidiary long (a year, two?) before the name change to Inprise.
So you're wrong, if you meant to imply that Borland bought out the independant gang *directly*; but you're right in that there *was* such a gang (ex-employees of something big -- DEC, perhaps?), that was bought up by Ashton-Tate. I remember a few years ago, when Borland dBase wasn't doing too well and everybody was saying how stupid it was of Borland to buy A-T, how some columnist (might have been John Dvorak, of all people) wrote that perhaps that didn't matter; that perhaps the secret crown jewel that Borland was *really* after was InterBase.
Anyway, InterBase has kind of come full circle, in that it now is a corporation of its own again. Except that it's a subsidiary, of course.
"This way or that way, Linux developers should really take a look into InterBase DBMS. BTW, they still offer (oldish) 4.0 for Linux free of charge."
Yup! See my URL above? Yes, I *did* change it a few months back -- because IB moved the download! Before that, it pointed to where IB4/Linux was *then*; I must have had it for over a year now, altogether.
"Combined with the open-sourced AOLserver (see previous Slashdot story) with AOLserver driver for InterBase, it can be helluva web/db application tool."
Don't forget to go to http://www.photo.net/wtr/ and check out the whole -- freely downloadable, Open Source? -- interactive web site system by Philip Greenspun!
Christian R. Conrad
MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here
Not to mention that standarization is very important in some corporate environments. I imagine it would be much easier to add/replace developers if you had a standard IDE system rather than one or two guys custom emacs macros and shell scripts. This might impair on an individual developer's flexibilty, but allows management to treat developers more like resources and reduces the amount job-security-enhancing voodoo involved.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Take a look at :
http://www.inprise.com/about/hr/99083.html
"Senior engineering position responsible for research and development of major subsystems of Delphi for Linux. Work with the entire team to create Delphi for Linux."
Also the following was posted on the Borland news server a couple of days ago :
The job offer is definately not a joke . In fact it's not the only job available for Linux at Borland, there are more available right now including for C/C++ on Linux. I wouldn't go so far as to say that we are working on things "in secret", but I will say that we are not yet prepared to make any public announcements. Stay tuned...
Michael Swindell
Sr. Product Manager
Borland Developer Solutions, Inprise Corporation