Joseph MItzen

You're complaining about ideology in the open source community, but you used some stereotypes yourself. Today it is companies that are the key contributors to the Linux kernel, Red Hat is being purchased by IBM for $34 billion dollars, and companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft seem to be in a race to see who can release the most open source code. Open source isn't the enemy of companies; open source is often the reason many startup companies can exist. Open source (e.g. Linux, Apache, Hadoop, PostgreSQL, etc.) enable them to be competitive with much larger companies right away without the formerly massive amount they would have had to spend on software or years it would have taken to develop software internally. Open source is inescapable in the corporate world today (well, maybe in Embarcadero). The two go hand in hand. Heck, even Microsoft is now a member of the Linux Foundation! I also don't see the open source community as having grown more ideological. They don't need to; they've won. On the one hand you've got Microsoft open sourcing most of C#, running Linux on Azure and porting SQL Server to Linux; on the other side you've got employers requesting applicants' Github accounts on job applications. Meanwhile, the FreePascal crowd has vowed never to accept a patch for type inference. It's generally the smaller the group or less successful the cause that tends to bring out fanaticism. "The fanatic is one whom, upon forgetting their purpose, redoubles their effort."

But the most hardcore are the ones least willing to admit there are any quality problems. I still believe the best use of resources would be to support NewPascal.... http://newpascal.org/ ...which is based on FPC with a collection of patches the FPC folks won't or haven't gotten around to accepting. It's not easy to get yourself out from vendor lock-in, especially for Delphi users who may have spent 20+ years getting themselves further and further dug in. I know I spent two years disentangling my personal desktop from Windows before I was able to successfully move to Linux.

Isn't the core really the framework? There are several compilers available for dialects of Pascal (Oxygene, FPC, etc.) Even if FPC was a 100% clone of the current Delphi language it wouldn't be much use to legacy customers without a compatible VCL implementation to go along with it. Regards money in writing an IDE, JetBrains is doing just fine selling IDEs... so many, in fact, that they can charge individuals 1/15 the cost of Delphi Pro and offer open source versions of their Python and Java IDEs and even sell a subscription to all of their compilers for far less than Delphi costs. In fact, they can also open source their Kotlin language under the reasoning that they'll be the best source for an IDE for it. And they'll also give away 10-user versions of their bug tracking and project management software, yet somehow they haven't raised prices in at least three years while Delphi's renewal cost goes up 4% every year. That said, the bulk of Embarcadero's Delphi customers are long-time users locked into a large amount of legacy code. There's no real financial benefit to EMBT to open sourcing the compiler. It would be of no benefit to the end users either. Former EMBT employee Barry Kelly inadvertently revealed that the 32bit compiler is over one million lines of undocumented (!!!) ANSI C code. Good luck trying to form a community around that! If they wanted to help they could produce a formal specification for the language, something they've rejected in the past. Then an open source community could leverage LLVM and have a modern, clean compiler produced long before they'd managed to gain any insight into the ancient desktop Delphi compiler's code base.

Really? He was praising them in his blog post.

Why don't they make a lot of sense?

Mapping days of the weeks to numbers. For instance, in some systems Monday is zero, while with ISO it is 1-7. And in the United States we like the week to start on Sunday instead of Monday.