Personally it appears to me that this could be a huge issue when it comes to possible intellectual property rights. Say you've spent several months developing a utility or game and all the sudden you're the next ICQ. In swoops Intel, Ford, etc.. claiming that you've developed this on their equipment and the resultant product is there.
A far more likely situation is Intel is sued by an employee or outside agency. They determine that the personal e-mail of a particular employee would be usefull. They then waltz in, claim you wrote the e-mail on their computer, and take whatever they like.
Anyone have a copy of the agreement Intel or Ford has their employees sign before getting these computers? If there is no agreement then the recipients are leaving themselves very open to interpretation of some implied agreement in court.
In my experience C++ Builder is just as easy to use as VB. You drag and drop controls onto forms, hit run and viola, it works. The best part about C++ Builder is that it combines the ease of use of VB with a powerfull and flexible language like C++. In my opinion C++ Builder is what MS Visual C should always have been.
That said I think the major benefit of Corel buying Inprise is that both companies are working heavily on Linux products. In my eyes this combined effort will do nothing but speed up development of good Linux applications and tools. This can be nothing but good for the Linux community.
If C++ Builder is ported as I believe it will be we'll finally have a powerfull, easy to use GUI development tool for X under Linux. People will be able to develope applications under Linux/X just as easily as under Windows. If Inprise puts some effort into it then C++ Builder projects might be cross platform compatible without any code changes.
On the other hand I've seen Inprise repeatedly stop short of a viable enterprise product and just say "We're done". For instance C++ Builder cannot read COFF libraries (MSVC format libraries) but MSVC can read OMF format libraries (C++ Builder's format) with no problem. The major problem with this is that 90+% of the SDK's out there use COFF format libraries and have no OMF format equivilant. This makes C++ Builder useless in a good deal of Enterprise projects. Also C++ Builder is a C++ development tool and if you purchase the Entrpise package the source for all the visual tools comes with it, but the source is in Object Pascal. It doesn't take much effort to convert this source to C++ but it makes the tool look very shoddy from an enterprise standpoint (why should my programmers have to learn object pascal to use a C++ product?). Given that last part is only a problem if you have/want to modify the visual components, but I have found bugs that required changes to visual components themselves and spent hours porting to C++.
Anyhow, if Inprise overcomes these hurdles we could see a huge increase in the amount and quality of tools/applications produced for Linux/X. Regardless they come out with C++Builder for Linux I'll buy it no matter what it's flaws may be.
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Personally it appears to me that this could be a huge issue when it comes to possible intellectual property rights. Say you've spent several months developing a utility or game and all the sudden you're the next ICQ. In swoops Intel, Ford, etc.. claiming that you've developed this on their equipment and the resultant product is there.
A far more likely situation is Intel is sued by an employee or outside agency. They determine that the personal e-mail of a particular employee would be usefull. They then waltz in, claim you wrote the e-mail on their computer, and take whatever they like.
Anyone have a copy of the agreement Intel or Ford has their employees sign before getting these computers? If there is no agreement then the recipients are leaving themselves very open to interpretation of some implied agreement in court.
-E.J. Wilburn
That said I think the major benefit of Corel buying Inprise is that both companies are working heavily on Linux products. In my eyes this combined effort will do nothing but speed up development of good Linux applications and tools. This can be nothing but good for the Linux community.
If C++ Builder is ported as I believe it will be we'll finally have a powerfull, easy to use GUI development tool for X under Linux. People will be able to develope applications under Linux/X just as easily as under Windows. If Inprise puts some effort into it then C++ Builder projects might be cross platform compatible without any code changes.
On the other hand I've seen Inprise repeatedly stop short of a viable enterprise product and just say "We're done". For instance C++ Builder cannot read COFF libraries (MSVC format libraries) but MSVC can read OMF format libraries (C++ Builder's format) with no problem. The major problem with this is that 90+% of the SDK's out there use COFF format libraries and have no OMF format equivilant. This makes C++ Builder useless in a good deal of Enterprise projects. Also C++ Builder is a C++ development tool and if you purchase the Entrpise package the source for all the visual tools comes with it, but the source is in Object Pascal. It doesn't take much effort to convert this source to C++ but it makes the tool look very shoddy from an enterprise standpoint (why should my programmers have to learn object pascal to use a C++ product?). Given that last part is only a problem if you have/want to modify the visual components, but I have found bugs that required changes to visual components themselves and spent hours porting to C++.
Anyhow, if Inprise overcomes these hurdles we could see a huge increase in the amount and quality of tools/applications produced for Linux/X. Regardless they come out with C++Builder for Linux I'll buy it no matter what it's flaws may be.
-E.J. Wilburn