Labrador

Hi, I'm wondering if anyone has experience with the license of the community edition. The question is regarding if I make a program and release it under a permissive license as gpl for example, and my employer (that makes over US $5000 in revenue) would use it, would this be considered as a license breech? Even if not intended, if they use the program they also benefit from it and this would automatically force me to purchase a license? Any experience or insights on the matter is appreciated, I'm looking into learning Delphi / object pascal, but if this would be a issue it's probably best to go with Lazarus IDE instead? Thanks,

Absolutely, I don't question that Embarcadero is a profitable company and must be able to pay wages to the developers and pay for hardware / infrastructure. By all rights they are entitled to make a profit. I just think that the community edition isn't really a good gateway into the Pascal language for newcomers due to the restricted license. One could look at the QT framework for example, they utilize a dual license: commercial / open source. For my part I'll never become a professional developer, I'll be a "weekend warrior" and code for fun and relaxation only so buying the e.g. professional edition to publish whatever I make as open source won't be a option.

From what I gather from the replies, it seems best not to use the community edition for any intent of distributing compiled programs to be on the safe side. It's sad in a way, since the IDE seems to be a powerful tool with much potential and it would be a great way to attract new developers to the Delphi / Pascal language. As it seems, the Pascal language has fallen somewhat out of grace the last years but as a newcomer to programming the Pascal syntax seems both structured and clear, and I will continue learning the language but it seems best not to use Delphi to do it with.

Hi, As it states in section 10 of the community edition faq (https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/faq): If any company would to install the compiled program made from community edition, they would per se benefit from it as I see it. And therefore I would automatically have breached the license agreement? I wish that they would consider a more flexible use of the compiled programs if it had a copyleft license (GPL, MIT and so on). Since I'm new to the forum, I don't know if there's any representation from Embarcadero on the forum that we could get some insights from? Thanks,

Hi, Thanks for the answer, this is sort of what I'm also afraid of. That even if I use the IDE on my personal laptop and never connect it to the work network that there's some kind of telemetry on the distributed program that phones home to see if it's on any company network. And if I release it as GPL or similar, I can't control who installs it or where. So I guess that the Community Edition wouldn't be a good fit for developing programs that will be distributed? Thanks,