Borland to sell Delphi

[tech-pro]

A lot of people seem to have missed this announcement:

http://www.borland.com/us/company/news/press_releases/2006/02_08_06_borland_acquires_segue_software.html

It appears that Borland wants to sell its IDE business (i.e. Delphi). What will happen if they don't find a buyer (or even if they do) is anyone's guess at the moment.

It seems to me that here is a great opportunity to promote Lazarus. An open source, user-developed product is not at the mercy of business strategic decisions, but will be around (and supported) as long as its users want it to be.

[objectref]

A lot of people seem to have missed this announcement:

http://www.borland.com/us/company/news/press_releases/2006/02_08_06_borland_acquires_segue_software.html

It appears that Borland wants to sell its IDE business (i.e. Delphi). What will happen if they don't find a buyer (or even if they do) is anyone's guess at the moment.

It seems to me that here is a great opportunity to promote Lazarus. An open source, user-developed product is not at the mercy of business strategic decisions, but will be around (and supported) as long as its users want it to be.

There are taking place many conversation on many blogs about it, Delphi's future etc etc. Is is indeed a great moment to promote Lazarus but there is a questionanable option for Delphi, planed in the air,  to become opensource, and if that happend (not very likely but still a possibility) is surely not good news for Lazarus...

[RudieD]

I think that if Delphi goes OSS route it will be greate for lazarus because then we can make use of a lot of the Delphi Unit (with minor changes).

[mikiwoz]

agreed. and a *lot* of work would have to be done with Delphi to make it cross-platform, whereas Lazarus already is.

Cheers
Mike

[RudieD]

Do you guys think that maybe then Tex would join since he were part of the Original Delphi 1 team ?

[felipemdc]

What is Tex doing these days?

Right now I think it is very hard to predict what this will signify for Delphi. It all depends on who buys it, and that's very hard to predict.

One thing I can say is that I find it very unlikely for Delphi to go Open Source.

The only other thing I can say is: Good luck Delphi.

[RudieD]

Last I heard Tex went to M$ !

[Anonymous]

What to expect from a corporation? I've loved Borland products because of their developing power. Everything is reduced to money and because they don't earn so much from selling IDE products, they have decided to sell them and "accelerate" ALM software developing (to accelerate bullshiting sells I guess). So perhaps, Delphi will die. I don't know if that is good or bad for Lazarus, but everything is going from bad to worse each day as corporations decide "new strategies". This is the power of open source comunity, as software is developed by people for people. Maybe there should also be made an open sourced Windows for those who didn't migrate to Linux already.

[diogenes]

There is actually some open-source "windows": http://www.reactos.org/xhtml/en/index.html . It's in alpha stat right now, but nonetheless...

[Marmin_]

might be  Delphi is rejected by Borland, and they make it open source. just get the feeling there's too much doubt  in Borland delphi. of course in game industry everyone knows the $$$ is to be found in C++ let us be underdogs and creative.

 let us focus on the object pascal ide like lazarus and let the community grow. not only for database but also for games.

[Marmin_]

by the way, if i may be very bold i do suggest a name change.

Forget Delphi.

Lazarus is, in my very humble opinion. also not very good.

as this is open source, why not let the users decide a name.

like:

-power pascal (google search gives no matches)

feedback is appreciated.

[mikiwoz]

I am against changing the name, and here's why:

1. The name doesn't really matter much, does it? (look at "Delphi" for an example. WTF has the Greek oracle to ObjectPascal programming, anyway?);

2. The name, actually, isn't just "Lazarus" - it's "Lazarus/FreePascal" if you want it to be a match for Delphi. Now that's quite an informative name, IMHO;

3. The current name is actually more widespread than it seems - let us not make the Borland/Inprise/Borland mistake and cause confusion to users;

4. The change would be simply pointless - why bother, anyway?

5. The name "PowerPascal" is definetely a bad one - Lazarus *is not* a Pascal compiler nor a Pascal language implementation/specification. Lazarus is "just" and IDE, component library and widget bindings. "PowerPascal" would, again, cause confusion, and we would rather evade it, now wouldn't we?

Cheers
Mike

[bshellenberg]

Ahmen Mike, especially on point #3. When Borland became Inprise, it was the beginning of the end for me.

[felipemdc]

1. The name doesn't really matter much, does it? (look at "Delphi" for an example. WTF has the Greek oracle to ObjectPascal programming, anyway?);

Look at Microsoft. Almost all their products have names that privitize the vocabulary, like:

Internet explorer - tries to privitize the work Internet
Windows - tries to privitize the whole concept of a Window
Word
etc

I bet they don´t do this without a reasone and I also bet they paided a lot of money for people to choose those names. Something like "Visual Pascal" would be the MS-like name for Lazarus.

But changing the name right now will probably do more harm then good because of point #3 above.

[mikiwoz]

...Microsoft - tries to privatize the whole concept of puny software?

If that's the "Microsoft way", it's even a stronger argument not to do it, IMHO.

Cheers
Mike