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Sir
Regarding the Bytegeist article
on open sourcing and reference to Kylix: "I
don’t know how
successful Kylix was or is. All I can tell you is
that you can’t
buy it from Borland’s online shop (give
it a try), which probably says quite a lot. Maybe
the SlashDots were so morally offended by actually
having to reward someone for honest toil, they didn’t
buy it. Who knows?"
You might be interest to know that Kylix has largely
been abandoned by Borland and version 3 is offered
as open source but is largely useless because it
will only run on old versions of SUSE (7.3). Unless
one is a Linux guru and willing to work miracles,
it is almost impossible to get it to work on newer
versions of Linux. I was one of the early purchasers
of Kylix 1.0, spending almost $1000 for the 'Professional'
version. It apparently didn't sell well enough at
that price, so eventually Borland cut the price for
the pro version in half and sold the ‘Architect’ version
for $1000. I complained about getting the short end
of the stick to Borland and, to their credit, they
tried to appease me by sending me the 'Architect'
version of 1.0 for free, but by then I was pretty
frustrated with the product, having had major problems
in using it due to the fact that it requires one
to be a real Linux expert just to get it to install
and run properly.
So I have a piece of development software I paid
$1000 for that is useless and has been superseded
by an open source version that is, alas, an orphan.
There are a number of people still using Kylix and
clammering for a new version from Borland but I am
not very confident it will happen. This is not the
first marketing debacle by Borland and I am sure
that it won't be the last. I am still devoted to
Delphi as many others are, but am not so sure how
committed Borland is to Delphi. Delphi is the only
reason I am still a programmer.
I have other reasons to find fault with Borland.
Beginning in 1989, I used a product called DBXL (a
dBase clone interpreter) and a companion compiler,
Quicksilver, both marvelous DOS products in their
day from a company called WordTech. Shortly after
WordTech produced the first version of a product
called Arago, the first xBase compiler to use a GUI
(preceding Foxpro), Borland bought out WordTech (purportedly
for their advanced technology) and then promptly
scuttled that product line in favor of their dBase
5 and Visual dBase products (now also abandoned).
Despite switching over to Clipper (also a great product
destroyed by CA), I was able to continue to maintain
QuickSilver and DBXL code for another 15 years and
one legacy DOS app is still running under W2K, a
testament to how good those products were.
I am a fan of both commercial and open source products
and feel their is room for both. It is one way to
keep the software vendors somewhat honest by offering
alternatives at a more reasonable cost. As an individual
software developer, I understand the necessity of
getting paid for my labors, but I also resent how
some companies take over products and milk them for
revenue while providing little support, improvement
or bug fixing.
Mark J. Wallin, Ph.D.
Sir,
Dr. Dermot Hogan wrote an interesting piece, The
Worst Things In Life Are Free - except
for the bit about pirates in Uzbekistan. You really
think they need the source code to knock
out cheap illegal copies? The CIS is 99%
on Windows and of those copies I'd estimate
no less than 80% are pirated, including Windows
XP that requires activation. You don't really need
the source code to crack commercial software and make
as many copies of it as you want.
Igor Faslyeff
Sir,
I would like to request more articles on the Chrome
Language for .NET. I've just started playing with
it, and am just amazed at the elegance and power
of the language. As a Delphi user since Turbo Pascal
4.0, I feel like coding could be fun again upon seeing
Chrome.
Articles I would specifically be interested in,
would focus on Database connectivity, The unique
language features of Chrome, and 3rd Party products
that support Chrome.
Daniel Bayerdorffer |
