Re: Response a negative view about Delphi


"PL" <pl@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:48620c35$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
John,

I think you have a serious problem with the facts on which you base your
opinion. I ran across some similar posts of yours in the past, and the
crown jewel of your arguments is the example of TurboPower.

I bring up TP because the arguments made prior to it's OSing were identical
to your's.


I'm not familiar with the exact details of that case, and I doubt that you
know all there is to know in order to analyze why there was no
continuation. Anyway TurboPower is just one single example. Sure there may
be other similar examples.

Yep. SourceForge is full of them. Most projects there stagnate in 0.x
versions forever, never moving into being a full "product".


However there are plenty of examples of successful Open Source projects,
including some that were based off of a commercial product: MySQL,
OpenOffice, Firebird, Firefox & Co., Solaris (which is just now picking up
steam as Open Source), and plenty others.

Actually, there are only a few--you've already listed most of them. And if
you look into the way these are being developed, you will see that they were
lucky enough to benefit from a few energetic individuals, even the ones that
list hundreds of "contributors" are usually just the favorite child of one
or two super-programmers that have an interest in them for whatever reason.

And there's always the annoying fact that Delphi's popularity is
declining, in great part due to stagnation, resentment from long time
supporters over the direction of development, loss of technological
leadership, and of course loss of developers' interest due to competing
FREE platform.

C# is not really free, neither is Visual Studio in it's most useful
incarnation.


With all respect to CG's efforts to add some features to Delphi, it's too
little too slow. Delphi is not going to spring back to life just because
it's a commercial product. However it MAY spring back to life if it
becomes Open Source.

Very doubtful. Compiler experts almost never contribute their time and
effort to free open source software.


You and many others seem to miss two major points regarding Open Sourcing
a commercial product:

- Open Sourcing a product does not mean that it becomes free (beer) for
all. The product can remain fully commercial AND be Open Source. See
MySQL.

I'd rather see all the examples of companies that thought they were going to
make a profit on open source software but instead are actually having
financial difficulties. There seem to be a lot more of those.


- The company which owns the product does not cease any and all
development. On the contrary, many successful Open Source projects depend
(at least for a while) on the leadership and organization provided by a
company.

Not many, just some. And they are idiosyncratic.


What will Codegear/Embarcadero lose from open sourcing Delphi? They give
up nothing business wise.

Except almost all of their revenue and any long-term competitive advantage
they might have.

They will give knowledge and freedom to developers (which costs next to
nothing to provide), and in return they get free work from developers.

It is not free work. Reintegrating, monitoring, organizing, allocating,
testing and designing code takes a lot of resources even if the developers
(stupidly) work for free.


At worst there will not be hundreds of developers interested in helping
Delphi. So there will be only a few dozens with itches to scratch
(Wouldn't you peek at the code, just out of curiosity? And if you find
something you can fix or improve, wouldn't you submit a patch?)

On the other hand there IS interest in a community supported Pascal
platform - the existence of FreePascal and Lazarus is proof. Not just
interest but some serious talent as well.

Actually they are proof that OSS doesn't work.


(I know, FreePascal is not up to the level of Delphi, and Lazarus is not
up to the level of the VCL. But both projects achieved impressive level of
capabilities, and continue to improve.

I don't think they are impressive, sorry.

In particular FreePascal which even surpasses Delphi in some respects eg.
multiple CPU architecture, multiple operating systems.)

The bottom line is that CG/EMBC don't give up any commercial right, and on
the other hand they get at least some free work, and a lot of new interest
in Delphi (as a viable platform for students, casual programmers, freeware
and open-source developers).

Where exactly is the problem?

The problem seems to be in the low level of understanding of economics
implicit in your arguments. It is not free work, and anyone who has ever
looked at the economics of software development will easily see that. The
main impediment to most software projects is not the fact that the software
developers get paid to work on it, nor that the code is confidential, it is
that it is very difficult to manage software developers and software
development. The main costs of developing software are not the developers'
salaries, it is the problems inherent in communicating clearly between team
members, getting the design right, testing, debugging and QAing, and the
difficulty of doing proper design and accommodating changes to the design
over time. None of these economic costs are lower with open source, in fact
many of them are far worse. You say that you get the work of "hundreds" of
programmers "for free", but what you fail to see is that one's competitors
are also getting all that work for "free" in addition to the work of the
programmers that made the product before it went Open Source--but they are
not having to pay the high economic cost of coordinating all those
programmers.

It is the difficulty of doing proper design that seems to plague most OSS.
Look at Linux as a perfect example. That OS is not nearly as well designed
as Windows XP--it is a piece of crap that most PC users will never even try
to use. The only OSS that seems well-designed is Firefox.

But even if one were to dismiss all this, there remain significant technical
barriers to a successful open-sourcing of Delphi. The IDE code is written in
several different languages that are not available in free IDE's. Several
sections of the code are copyrighted and/or are the proprietary code of
third-parties. There are several patents associated with the code. Etc.


.

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