This is how the Delphi and Turbo Pascal 3rd party markets have worked for a long time: you pay for 3rd party components/libraries, but they almost all come with source code or an option to purchase the source code for an additional charge. It works really, really well, especially for larger organizations that buy from smaller organizations that want to ensure the continued availability of the software and/or audit it for security purposes.
One problem is reluctance to buy closed-source from a one man business, it could even be regarded as negligent. Actually, having said that, Delphi had a thriving third party component ecosystem where developers commonly purchased the source code for an additional fee.
Yes, and later on the entire Delphi ecosystem frowned on not making the source code to third party components available in at least some form, so most did. Borland originally set the stage for this by including the source code to the entire RTL/VCL in Delphi, which continues to this day.
We're using Delphi with various component packs. It would be very expensive to buy all the components at once but we bought all the tools necessary during the previous years one by one. If you want to make Windows apps and you can ignore developer community's hostility against Pascal, then I would recommend Delphi, but if you plan on making cross-platform solutions then take a look at Qt.
Pirating will happen, that's inevitable. The main thing here is not to make your paying customers victims in the fight against pirates and not to worry too much about your software in torrents. Make sure your keys can't be easily generated; people tend to avoid using modified executables for reasonable fear of viruses but have no problems using pirated keys.
The commercial software community that grew up around the Borland (now Embarcadero) Delphi development tool is a good language. This was a component-environment. Typically pay one price for the component and a higher price for the sources. Lots of commercial products that distributed source code.
Delphi itself distributes source to the entire framework.
Might be a good place to look at licenses.
Delphi would have a much wider adoption if the compiler was open source and the IDE was propietary and sold only as a subscription, that is, similar to Jetbrains Kotlin model.
Unfortunately it will not happen because Embarcadero current strategy revolves around milking their existing enterprise customers while their IT policies require that an aplication in production is built with components that have a support contract in place.
Eh, the ones made by one or two people working part time and selling them as shareware weren't necessarily better than what we have available now. They may have been good enough for their time, but probably wouldn't cut it today.
And the ones made by corporations were prohibitively expensive. As a teenager wanting to learn, or a hobbyist making programs for fun, would you really pay $4500 for a compiler to tinker with projects in your spare time? There's one reason hardly anyone uses Delphi anymore. By the time they finally released a Community Edition, there was no community left that had grown up learning Pascal.
You ignore that Delphi is not just the IDE, it is the whole ecosystem of components that are developed to work with it, and these components usually come with source code and are supported by developers who are incentivised to make them work.
It is the tool used by developers whose customers want custom stuff done yesterday, customers whose time is 100s worth more than the trifling sums that open source developers are unable to get even their commercial users to pay for or contribute to.
Object Pascal is a great language, with many modern features and very optimized. Delphi add to this the best WYSIWYG ide ever created.
But they could have used free pascal and save millions, though. This looks like your usual government corruption. At least this time they bought something useful.
I'd also think "It's $1400 cheaper than Delphi" would be a good selling point.
I started using Turbo Pascal in college when it was $49. Given that Embarcadero Delphi is competing with a lot of stuff that is free and high-quality, I doubt it's got anywhere to go but down from here.
As someone who worked with Delphi for many years I've often wondered if there is a lot of money to be made by charging companies to work on these codebases. As much as I liked Delphi back in the day,
low job satisfaction puts me off looking in to the idea.
In a way it seems Embarcadero have their blinders on. But it is better than nothing. I think I would make the Delphi compiler free and charge everybody a pure subscription for the IDE at pricing levels comparable to Jetbrains, but without any kind of fallback to avoid competing with yourself. It would allow them to focus on making an excellent IDE to secure recurring revenue, at their own pace. But they seem to be wired to chase (existing) corporate accounts. Obviously they will be people who will develop tooling around their free compilers, but that helps build a funnel for a high quality IDE and greatly increases chances to become a platform again.
That library the author linked to target Linux, FMXLinux, costs $1500 to use. And that's the problem with Delphi: its ecosystem. They are anti-open, anti-share, and charge ridiculous sums of money - with questionable quality. There is nothing like Pythons pip, Rubys gems, or Rusts crates, with a plethora of free libraries.
It has been that way since well before I started using Object Pascal.
I'm very sad that Delphi is so inaccessible for hobbyists. In some spare hours I'm building a native app in Qt, but I'd have definitely built it with Delphi if I wouldn't have had to cough up 3000 dollars just to get started.
In all frankness I don't get why Embarcadero doesn't copy Qt's licensing. If they make a free GPL version, Delphi-based open source could thrive while just about everybody who buys a license now would still be required to buy a license.
Yeah Free Pascal and Lazarus don't do the full Turbo Pascal and Delphi Object Oriented Pascal features.
I was going to write a book on Free Pascal, and an Intro to Pascal using Free Pascal. But my Pascal skills are so out of date it would only be text based code and not OOP. Free Pascal and Lazarus need some books written on them. But I'm not skilled enough to write them.
There used to be a Borland Museum that gave away DOS versions of Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Turbo C++ etc. I think the current link is here: http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/
I haven't tried it in a while. They have the specs on Delphi 1.0 but never gave away Delphi 1.0 which would have been a 16 bit Windows program.
I've seen versions of Delphi on Bit Torrent sites, but I stay away from pirated software. Sometimes the cracks are infected with viruses. Better to stay with Free Pascal and Lazarus instead. Besides Free Pascal and Lazarus are cross platform. Delphi isn't cross platform.
Trade Wars Game Server is still written in Delphi, it is based on the old BBS Tradewars 2002 written in Turbo Pascal. http://www.eisonline.com/ They went from modem connections to Internet Telnet connections. People still play it and buy it.
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