JkEnigma

Hi all, Currently, I am using Free Pascal but I realized that Delphi has several possibilities that would come in handy for me. I would like to give the Community Edition a try. However, I still remember using the free version of Borland Delphi which was discontinued after Delphi moved to CodeGear. That is a long time ago and Embarcadero is another company, but still... Does anybody have information about the long term availability of the Community Edition? TIA

I agree with your point of view. I intend to use Delphi only for open source/free software so I will never reach the $5K threshold, no problem with that. And indeed, FP/Lazarus is a good alternative: I used it for some time. But it has some drawbacks that I hope to solve with Delphi. The price tag for RAD Studio might be relatively high but that should not be a problem for a software company or a freelancer making commercial software. And if you're not making money with your software, the CE comes in quite handy 🙂 . My main concern was a possible policy change regarding the availability of the CE. But indeed, if the CE would be discontinued that would stop a lot of people that would give Delphi a try. So there is probably a good reason for Embarcadero to continue the CE.

Thanks for the answers. Clearly, there are some drawbacks. I just installed the CE and intend to do a small project. I hope the advantages outweigh the drawbacks. My main reason is to be able to use Spring4D, so I will give that a try.