The only chance that Delphi has is pure and unconditional open source.
As soon as Borland (or, to be precise, "DevCo", the new IDE business owner) did that, a bunch of open source enthusiasts would tear the code apart and Delphi as we know it would die.
As a matter of fact, it is my opinion that proprietary projects migrate to open source mostly to die a slow death. At best, any reasonably complex project that forgoes this transition is at high risk of being mutilated.
Yes, Interbase 6.5 did eventually spawn the Firebird project. But a db engine is quite different beast than a full blown development IDE with its own runtime and component library, so forgive me for being a skeptic in this case. Hell, just take a look at what JEDI project has become! And that's only the "component library" part of Delphi!
Feel free to mod me down, but I'm honestly tired of listening to these "Free Delphi!" campaigns. Free it from what?
So Borland made some terrible mistakes when trying to converge Win32 development with the new.NET paradigm. Delphi 8 and partially BDS 2005 were far from great, nobody is denying that. But the latest BDS 2006 really shows that they've learned from their mistakes. I'm sure soon-to-be-released BDS 2007 will be even better!
Would you honestly want them to throw all this hard learned experience away and leave Delphi's future in the "capable" hands of the open source community?
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As a matter of fact, it is my opinion that proprietary projects migrate to open source mostly to die a slow death. At best, any reasonably complex project that forgoes this transition is at high risk of being mutilated.
Yes, Interbase 6.5 did eventually spawn the Firebird project. But a db engine is quite different beast than a full blown development IDE with its own runtime and component library, so forgive me for being a skeptic in this case. Hell, just take a look at what JEDI project has become! And that's only the "component library" part of Delphi!
Feel free to mod me down, but I'm honestly tired of listening to these "Free Delphi!" campaigns. Free it from what?
So Borland made some terrible mistakes when trying to converge Win32 development with the new
Would you honestly want them to throw all this hard learned experience away and leave Delphi's future in the "capable" hands of the open source community?
Thats what sucks about windows, you can't say that you rooted some one.
It is possible to rename the administrator account to anything else (even root)... =)