We’re an ISV with 20 Delphi developers using BDS 2006. We can no longer purchase BDS 2006 licenses. So we cannot grow at all without investing an estimated £70,000 in Delphi license fees, 3rd party component license fees, converting any no-longer-available 3rd party components and getting developers up-to-speed.

I’d pay twice the cost of BDS 2006 just to get a single license right now (and we need three!), but we just cant get them. What is worse is that when we reinstall we have to jump through hoops just to get our license keys registered (reg.borland.com).

If that isnt bad enough I feel that eventually even the above registration system might fall to the wayside meaning we may not even be able to reinstall BDS 2006 at some point in the future.

So, we’re faced with being force to shell out £70,000 for absolutely no return (we’re a bread and butter sort of company, we wont use the new features in the short term), or invest that cash into going down the Visual Studio route, we already have 40 licenses available being a Gold Partner.

I love Delphi, but alas the decision to stick with it is not easy.

Ross

Yes I completely agree with you!

I haven’t checked with current SA and Delphi 2010 prices but certainly it used to be that SA made sense for Enterprise/Architect users, where iirc you could skip every other version and still be better off with SA, but with Pro you HAD to find value in *every* Delphi release for SA to make more sense than upgrading – say – to every other version.

With the way that Unicode has been introduced even that logic broke down with 2009. Someone on Delphi 2007 and SA but unable to migrate their code to Delphi 2009 without incurring an unnecessary (for them and/or their customers), costly and risky Unicode effort, also has no use for Delphi 2010 (or 2011 or 2012…) unless/until they are compelled to tackle the Unicode hump.

And sure, the alternatives – e.g. migrating to C# – are an even bigger undertaking, but with what could be seen as additional advantages.

The Unicode hump in Delphi is, in contrast, “running to stand still”.

What most people don’t realise I think is that even once your application is compiling without Unicode warnings in D2009+, unless you have done a heck of a lot more work you still don’t have a true “Unicode” application. All you have is an ASCII application that to happens use the Windows Unicode API.

*Proper* Unicode support is a much bigger and more complicated issue, which is why I think the approach CodeGear took in their implementation was wrong-headed from the start.

Is it really “a good thing” that Embarcadero should be getting ideas that they can do the same? In the long run I am afraid this new policy is going to do more harm than good.

Consider someone that hasn’t already upgraded… Embarcadero have secure $0 from that customer for a Delphi 2010 upgrade. Does *increasing* cost for that person to eventually upgrade (because that IS what they are doing) make it more or less likely that they will eventually do so?

Any other argument is more about throwing hissy fits than it is about doing what’s best for the Delphi community (in terms of growing it an ensuring that it prospers). Talk of CodeGear being denied revenue because people have chosen not to upgrade is completely idiotic. Making it more expensive for them to make further contributions to CodeGear coffers simply makes it more likely that CodeGear won’t ever see another cent from those people ever again. It cannot change the existing purchasing history of those customers.

Since D2007 though, I think the quality is more than acceptible and I think both 2009 and 2010 are very good (best I use outside of Visual Studio). So they have more than enough quality to pull the plug and not lose their market.

How many of you that were professionally developing a product as old as Delphi would allow an upgrade policy that generous (I go back 1 generation or its a new version with my stuff).

Embarcadero has rejuvenated the language and the community is coming alive and growing again. They deserve some compensation for their investment.

I do agree its too expensive however, the prices should easily be half the current pricing structure.

OK, I agree, the price for Delphi is too high. I think they’d sell more copies and make more money if the “standard” version was $300, and the “architect/enterprise” was ~$600.

Delphi 7 was released in 2002…7 years ago. That same year, Microsoft released Visual Studio .NET, as well as v1.0 of the .NET Framework (the next year was when VS-2003 was released).

They don’t allow you to get the “upgrade” price from the 1st .NET supported version of VS to VS-2008…and many agree that was probably the poorest release of the IDE/language.

If you’re on Delphi 7 still, you’ve made a choice. Now it’s time to make a decision if you want to upgrade for a low price. The quality of the latest release is very high.

If you don’t want unicode, then upgrade to Delphi 2007. If not, then you will pay full price for Delphi 2011 (or whatever it’ll be called).

I’ve used Delphi since version 1.
I’ve upgraded every version of it from 1 to 7.

For my job version 7 is fantastic.

Embarcadero has done to delphi 7 a lot of good things *BUT* nothing that you cannot do yourself!

Take for example the new memory manager FastMM: you can integrate it in D7 and it *IS* really stable.
Or for example MMX (ModelMaker Code Explorer): with D7 you have nothing more useful than MMX.
Then you can install Gexperts or cnPack IDE Wizards or install them both.

Why do I have to pay someone that I’ve already payed in the past for Delphi 4, one of the most dangerous “viruses” you can deliberately decide to install on your pc?

I think that Embarcadero should enforce a refound policy for customers of Delphi 4, 2005 versions.

I’ve decided that unicode is a feature I can live without as are generics: I use generics in other languages, but for Delphi I can easily make an exception and not use them.

So please do a favor to yourself: install FastMM, buy MMX, add Gexperts and cnPack IDE Wizards and you will have something that is stable enough to do great things with it.

I’m also considering Lazarus: after all I really love Open Source.

After being a programmer since 1987 I’ve developed my personal opinions about my work: I don’t like those artisans that believe that they cannot accomplish their work without a particular tool. I’ve learned that the silver bullet is something that doesn’t exists.

Delphi is live! Long live to Delphi (7)