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Back when Delphi was owned by Borland, they had a fairly generous policy towards handing out free copies of their software products. Their actual "Cost of Goods" was tangible since back then sofware came on disks and there were always books included in the boxes. (Delphi itself was given out free to everybody who attended the launch event in 1995. I was there! And lots of free stuff was handed out at all sorts of conferences throughout the 90's. But those things have faded out, along with User Groups and similar in-person events. I did do a local in-person event as an MVP a few years ago, and they refused to give me a free license to raffle off. But they did send a bunch of pens and note-pads -- at far greater actual expense than a license code sent via email.) Today you have to pay to get a DVD if you want a physical copy on disk. The COGs is ZERO. Yet Embt fails to see the value in giving away licenses for any number of valid reasons that used to be commonplace. Even MVPs only get a license that's valid for 365 days. Even though the COGs for Delphi are ZERO, they build-in a 4% automatic increase in the maintenance agreement every year. When was the last time anybody here got even close to a 4% raise from their current employer? I don't think I've EVER gotten a raise over 2.5% without changing jobs. Honestly, I may be done upgrading Delphi. I let my maintenance agreement lapse just before D11 was released and I'm not missing it a bit. The whole world is moving towards web-based products and the only thing in D11 of any consequence is support for Microsoft's new Windows update -- because I suspect most of the revenues for Delphi come from thousands of corporations who are beholden to Microsoft and will all be upgrading (whether they like it or not) over the next 6 months or so. This creates a lot of maintenance work, which seems to be the only thing anybody hires Delphi people for today. Nobody is building web stuff using Delphi. Most companies are moving towards a "mobile-first" approach to apps, and even that is being dominated by Microsoft in many shops. Which means C# and .NET. Hobbiests are not buying Delphi for its cross-platform benefits because all the tools and libraries needed have FOSS licenses. But TMS has this thing called WebCore and you can build web apps in Delphi with it. In fact, you can even use Visual Studio Code, which is free, instead of the Dephi IDE. They just made all of their FNC components so you can add them to VSC, quadrupling the number of components available for WebCore apps. And they're preparing an update to their "wrapper" technology (Miletus) that's like Electron and lets you take a web app and turn it into a native app. The next version will support more platforms than Delphi, including Raspberry Pi's. I have an ALL-ACCESS license from TMS and the annual cost to renew it is less than half of my Delphi Enterprise license. It doesn't automatically increase by 4% annually, and it buys me a collection of tools that offer far more flexibility and relevance in today's market. They're also not afraid to add valueable things to the language that WebCore supports (Object Pascal) that people have been asking for in Delphi for ages. They're constantly adding more and more cool things to their platform; it's enough to make your head spin. Meanwhile, this latest Delphi release had nothing new that I need in it. It doesn't even fix the Refactoring bugs introduced in the last couple of 10.4 releases. They still charged 4% more for it again; but to me, it failed to deliver even 4% more value over 10.4.2. If I look at what has happened with Delphi over the past 12 months, and at what WebCore has done, there's no comparison. WebCore is moving faster in directions that the market is embracing, while Delphi is simply providing support for the latest version of Windows, hoping to justify its existence for Corporate IT Depts who need to decide whether to write a check to keep the maintenance releases coming or not while all of their new development is being done with other tools. And here we are debating on whether this huge billion-dollar corporation can afford to give a comp license (that doesn't cost them a penny) to a guy who has contributed more value to the Delphi community than most of the new features and bugs they ship with every update they put out. Same debate, different year. I think the problem is that most Corporations are very slow to move new Delphi releases into production, so they don't miss delays in updates for big component libs and things like what Andreus does because they do make it out sooner or later anyway. I think Embt is really only interested in Corporations because they just keep renewing their licenses and don't do much otherwise. They don't care about language features, only whether it supports the latest Microsoft Windows needs.

You named your topic ... Please write to Embarcadero to get a free Delphi 11 edition for Andreas Hausladen ... which pretty much states exactly that.

The title of the issue you lodged, and the question itself seemed to indicate that you did not have a version for Delphi 11 Alexandria. Perhaps I should have asked whether or not you could compile. I guess your answer means that you can. Given that, is the issue resolved?

I bet Peter hasn't even written to Embarcadero!!

As I demonstrated in my previous comment what you are looking for is impossible so clearly you must have misremembered.

IIRC, Andy has been offered a free license at least twice, but he reclined.

Thanks for the extensive Delphi history. I do refactoring only with MMX. In my opinion, Delphi programs suffer mainly from the old-fashioned STATIC LAYOUT reminiscent of DOS programs: if you change the font size of the main form in a Delphi application, the layout of the entire program collapses and becomes unusable. What Delphi needs most are DYNAMIC UI layouts. Example: Responsive web design in HTML.

Several Embarcadero employees (one of them Matthias Eissing from Embarcadero Germany) stated multiple times that Andy could get a free copy. But apparently there are strings attached to this offer that Andy didn't like so he declined. And having read the legal paperwork involved with becoming an MVP, I have an idea why.

Main issue with branches are merge conflicts. They tend to get worse with time because more code is added and there is potentially more conflict. So naturally, if you have short lived branches there is less possibility for conflicts to emerge. Also continuous delivery focuses on making small incremental changes (which is not always possible) so making small features that don't span across too much code (files) tend to be easily mergeable. Having said that, the lifetime alone actually means nothing. Nor the number of branches. First, you can easily shoot yourself in the foot with the branch old just a few hours, if you change some "hard" to merge file - think something like dproj file. On iOS, macOS that would be storyboards - you don't even need multiple developers to make a mess. So for some types of files, you will need to have specific instructions about who and how can change them without causing issues. Next, it is not how long branch lives, but whether you keep it up to date with other development. If you have branch and you merge it after a year, of course there will be trouble, but not because the branch is year old, but because you didn't keep it up. The most important rule is don't merge, rebase and rebase often. Not only that keeps history cleaner, but you will also have less conflicts - most of the time there will be none or they will be simple to resolve. And of course, in larger teams there has to be some coordination between what is done and when. It makes no sense to start some large refactoring in one part of the code few days before another large refactoring in overlapping area of the code is finished. It is better to wait than waste time on merging.

I spent quite a bit of time with Ann Lynnworth from https://www.codenewsfast.com and restored a full archive there. You can go find all the old messages there.

Until a few months ago, I also depended on BCB6 for my full-time job (my software has reached its End-Of-Life, so this is no longer an issue), but in the past 15-odd years, moving it into a VM was never really an option. The physical machine it ran in was over 500GB of logs, databases, backups, etc, so cloning it would have taken forever. But more importantly, it had specialized PCI hardware installed that didn't work inside a VM, and I never had the time to create a new VM with just BCB6 installed. I would have had to continue running my apps on the physical machine, but used the remote debugger inside a VM, and I wasn't too keen on that approach, either,

Alas, "Omnia orta cadunt"

I released quite a bit of interesting code to github over the years: YouTube DATA API v3 parsing: https://github.com/bLightZP/Delphi-YouTube-Channel-parsing-plugin-for-Zoom-Player Basic RSS feed parsing code: https://github.com/bLightZP/Delphi-RSS-feed-parsing-plugin-for-Zoom-Player TheAudioDB MetaData/Image scraping code: https://github.com/bLightZP/Delphi-theaudiodb.com-Zoom-Player-media-scraping-plug-in TheMovieDB MetaData/Image scraping code: https://github.com/bLightZP/Delphi-themoviedb.org-Zoom-Player-media-scraping-plug-in OpenSubtitles.org subtitle search & scrape code: https://github.com/bLightZP/Delphi-OpenSubtitles.org-API-support-for-Zoom-Player A basic cross-platform calculator https://github.com/bLightZP/ElegantCalculator https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inmatrix.ElegantCalculator Adapted old code to work as cross-platform pure-pascal image scaling with filters (bicubic, bilinear, etc): https://github.com/bLightZP/ImageInterpolation Adapted old code to work as a cross-platform drawing of an anti-aliased circle (can be modified to draw rount-rect as well): https://github.com/bLightZP/AntiAliasedCircle I forked a QRCode generating source code and greatly optimized it (~ x50 faster): https://github.com/bLightZP/DelphiZXingQRCode The original Delphi scanline color-conversion implementation was very slow, so I optimized it: https://github.com/bLightZP/OptimizedDelphiFMXScanline