Increasing registration count not possible without active maintenance support

[Guest]

46 minutes ago, Darian Miller said:

 

Clarity is certainly not one of his strong points.

 

It is a well known greek story: The Oracle of Delphi

 

Who am I thinking about? => „The prophetai are referred to in literary sources, but their function is unclear; it has been suggested that they interpreted the Pythia's prophecies, ...[]“

Edited June 11, 2019 by Guest

[Rollo62 536]

9 hours ago, Darian Miller said:

 

Clarity is certainly not one of his strong points.

 

Same what I think.

If missing clarity would have been a problem, then it would take only a few hours to correct that, before loosing hundrets of loyal customers.

Such a big damage to Embarcaderos trust and reputation (again and again) should not left open with two eyes closed by the management.

[Daniel 417]

Yes, but nontheless I like the idea of a self-service portal. Given that this will really allow me to use my perpetual licenses without any further troubles. (I am clearly not intending to re-install twice per day but about every 12-20 months I clear my VMs to have a fresh system.)

[mmb 25]

22 hours ago, Mike Margerum said:

Curious.  What are you porting to?

 

I agree on charging the customer for a straight port, but if im adding new features or value I wouldn't have an ethical issue and it would all be transparent to them.

 

Dam shame because Delphi was an awesome desktop dev tool.  Unrivaled.

I'm porting to various environments, depending on the need of the application. I am almost finished with a port of a Mac application to Swift (using Xcode). Granted this was more of a rewrite but since our customer requires 64 bit support (so they can deploy to the Mac App Store) and refuses to pay us without 64 bit support so I had no choice. Since from a customers perspective the application is exactly the same I cannot charge for porting, especially since I was the one that convinced the customer to go with Delphi when we started this project two years ago.... I feel like an idiot for having defended Emba/Delphi and now I am paying the price...

 

Other tools (mainly data analysis) I've ported to Python. This was also more of a rewrite and required a completely different mindset. My reservations "Python is just a script language" and "not type safe?" turned out to be completely unfounded; Properly written ("Pythonic") code is beautiful! Third party (open source) availability is simply amazing (micro-service architecture using ZeroMQ).

 

I did briefly consider Lazarus but decided against it. I could not afford to take any risks (swift on Mac OS is basically a given w.r.t. support) and Python runs anywhere. Stubbornly staying with object pascal also "felt" wrong; if the tool/language I trusted and relied upon for 20 years betrayed me I might as well take a deep dive and go in a completely different direction.

 

As a side-note: having seen what modern IDE's can do (Xcode/PyCharm) and what a joy they are to work with I highly doubt Emba will be able to catch up even if they start treating their customers as customers again.

 

I'm not ruling out ever taking a subscription again but it is going to take some really impressive releases and flawless ethical behaviour for Emba to regain my trust.

[WillH 33]

16 hours ago, Joseph MItzen said:

where Embarcadero tried to convince everyone that they never actually made any change. In this case, his clarification is actually a policy reversal and now he's going to tell sales to stop refusing to do the bumps. Then we'll all be told it was never the policy and we just misunderstood.

Joseph,

   I think you're absolutely right about this. The language used in the replies from support have subtly but significantly changed their tune.

 

From

Quote

Your renewals representative will be able to provide you with the options to renew your support and maintenance. Once your licenses are current on maintenance, we will be happy to help with this registration limit increase.

 

To

Quote

Your renewals representative will be able to assist you with options to renew your support and maintenance, as well as facilitate the necessary registration increases.

 

I assume that the new version means that customers without an active subscription will have to endure a sales pitch before getting their registration bump. (Although Atanas still won't explicitly say that)

 

I have no idea why they can't just admit the error, put in place the self service for bumps, and get on with trying to fix bugs and provide new features which actually work. Who knows, people may actually willingly stump up some cash for renewals rather than have to be held to ransom.

[Larry Hengen 39]

16 hours ago, Bill Meyer said:

Also keep in mind that they've told us for 20 years now that we don't understand marketing. Perhaps not -- I certainly do not understand THEIR marketing. But in my career I have learned a good deal about customer retention.

According to LinkedIn, his title is now: Mergers and Acquisitions Executive Advisor at Embarcadero Technologies.

And that does not seem to be marketing.

According to his LinkedIn profile (https://www.linkedin.com/in/miswindell/) he went from product marketing (3 years) to product management (remaining 8 years) at Borland.  Then 8 years of Product Management at EMBT and is now a consultant.  It almost sounds like he could have been the reason for Borland/EMBT's crappy marketing and therefore single handedly could have caused their decline while he rose in the ranks.  Perhaps he is the ONLY one who doesn't understand marketing...

[Daniel 417]

Sorry, but speculations about intentions and persons won't help here.

[cupwalker 5]

they did not do any auto bump - cant register for today. This was the last try.

[Guest]

20 minutes ago, cupwalker said:

they did not do any auto bump - cant register for today. This was the last try.

Did you read this? (Have a close look at the last paragraph)

20 hours ago, Jim McKeeth said:

Atanas just posted an update on his blog post.

 

Policy Update: We still receive occasional comments on this and want to make sure we are clear on our Policy. Registration limits were introduced a long time ago with very valid use cases, but many of these are now outdated. We still do them, just now they get approved by Account Management (Sales/Renewals) vs. Support. Further, we have done several auto-bumps for everyone that should limit these issues altogether (and will do more as needed). As communicated, over the summer, we will work on a more automated way to increase registration limits through the self-service portal.

 

It looks like there was an issue with the auto bump. I can manually process your registration bump if you private message me on here or email me: firstname dot lastname at embarcadero.com

 

[Mike Margerum 16]

On 6/12/2019 at 5:21 AM, mmb said:

I'm porting to various environments, depending on the need of the application. I am almost finished with a port of a Mac application to Swift (using Xcode). Granted this was more of a rewrite but since our customer requires 64 bit support (so they can deploy to the Mac App Store) and refuses to pay us without 64 bit support so I had no choice. Since from a customers perspective the application is exactly the same I cannot charge for porting, especially since I was the one that convinced the customer to go with Delphi when we started this project two years ago.... I feel like an idiot for having defended Emba/Delphi and now I am paying the price...

 

Other tools (mainly data analysis) I've ported to Python. This was also more of a rewrite and required a completely different mindset. My reservations "Python is just a script language" and "not type safe?" turned out to be completely unfounded; Properly written ("Pythonic") code is beautiful! Third party (open source) availability is simply amazing (micro-service architecture using ZeroMQ).

 

I did briefly consider Lazarus but decided against it. I could not afford to take any risks (swift on Mac OS is basically a given w.r.t. support) and Python runs anywhere. Stubbornly staying with object pascal also "felt" wrong; if the tool/language I trusted and relied upon for 20 years betrayed me I might as well take a deep dive and go in a completely different direction.

 

As a side-note: having seen what modern IDE's can do (Xcode/PyCharm) and what a joy they are to work with I highly doubt Emba will be able to catch up even if they start treating their customers as customers again.

 

I'm not ruling out ever taking a subscription again but it is going to take some really impressive releases and flawless ethical behaviour for Emba to regain my trust.

I went same route with swift on mac/ipad.  Aside from apple breaking swift every version it came out really good and i was able to reuse a significant amount of code between the platforms.  Swift is a nice language but having to interface with all of that objC API code was painful.  Apple is definitely going the right direction with Swift and making new Swift only APIS.

 

 

It would have been nice if i was able to use the same code on windows and ios/mac, but I realize that's mostly a pipe dream now.  

 

Agree on Lazarus.

 

I switched off python and started using Go.  Just had better experience keeping production stuff running better with Go.  Its the perfect server code language IMO.

 

So going forward i'm using swift for iOS / Mac and Go/Vue/Vuetify/Electron for multiple platform stuff.  Svelte.js looks very impressive and i may switch off Vue in a few years.

 

I'm not even comfortable keeping Delphi for win32 development at this point.  Microsoft has such a schizophrenic desktop development story.   I have no idea what to use to build native windows clients so I just won't i guess.  I may downgrade and keep delphi pro.  When you use reactive frameworks like Vue and soon SwiftUI, the old delphi style way of building GUIS feels bad.

 

WebAssembly is something I'm keeping my eye on as well.  I suspect this may become a great way to build multiplatform stuff both in and out of the browser.  Remobjects doing some interesting stuff in this space.

 

[Mike Margerum 16]

On 6/12/2019 at 8:40 AM, WillH said:

Joseph,

   I think you're absolutely right about this. The language used in the replies from support have subtly but significantly changed their tune.

 

From

 

To

 

I assume that the new version means that customers without an active subscription will have to endure a sales pitch before getting their registration bump. (Although Atanas still won't explicitly say that)

 

I have no idea why they can't just admit the error, put in place the self service for bumps, and get on with trying to fix bugs and provide new features which actually work. Who knows, people may actually willingly stump up some cash for renewals rather than have to be held to ransom.

Just get rid of the stupid process altogether.  If someone's going to steal the software, they probably weren't going to pay for it in the first place.  

[Guest]

I've almost finished porting my application for macOS and Windows from Delphi 10.2.1 to Lazarus 2.1. I had a couple of focus issues with the TEdit Cocoa widget, but one of the Cocoa developers had it resolved on the trunk version is a couple of days. Yeah, a couple of days. Since when has EMBT ever managed something like that?

 

As a result, my money is now going to support Lazarus Cocoa development. No more Delphi for me.

[Donald Shimoda 0]

... and now Idea try ti sell us RAD SERVER, a solution with NO source code. All the marketing and technical forces concentrated on the Rad Server. Jus imagine you take that road. Imagine they take any decisions on RAD licensing shecme in a near future and BLOCK your users! Imagen the amount of legal issues that will bring to your company! I believe Atalas is a poor manager. There's no any other explanation. Put a lot of money and want it back now. That have the potential of massive court battles if advance. He take only poor management decision. Closing Spanish offices, just to name the start of this. A shame because Delphi have terrific potential.

Edited June 21, 2019 by Donald Shimoda

[hsauro 40]

On 6/13/2019 at 12:47 PM, Mike Margerum said:

I went same route with swift on mac/ipad.  Aside from apple breaking swift every version it came out really good and i was able to reuse a significant amount of code between the platforms.  Swift is a nice language but having to interface with all of that objC API code was painful.  Apple is definitely going the right direction with Swift and making new Swift only APIS.

 

 

It would have been nice if i was able to use the same code on windows and ios/mac, but I realize that's mostly a pipe dream now.  

 

Agree on Lazarus.

 

I switched off python and started using Go.  Just had better experience keeping production stuff running better with Go.  Its the perfect server code language IMO.

 

So going forward i'm using swift for iOS / Mac and Go/Vue/Vuetify/Electron for multiple platform stuff.  Svelte.js looks very impressive and i may switch off Vue in a few years.

 

I'm not even comfortable keeping Delphi for win32 development at this point.  Microsoft has such a schizophrenic desktop development story.   I have no idea what to use to build native windows clients so I just won't i guess.  I may downgrade and keep delphi pro.  When you use reactive frameworks like Vue and soon SwiftUI, the old delphi style way of building GUIS feels bad.

 

WebAssembly is something I'm keeping my eye on as well.  I suspect this may become a great way to build multiplatform stuff both in and out of the browser.  Remobjects doing some interesting stuff in this space.

 

It would be fun if there were an object pascal to webassembly compiler.

 

Edited June 21, 2019 by hsauro

[WillH 33]

6 hours ago, hsauro said:

object pascal to webassembly compiler.

Like Remobjects ?

https://blogs.remobjects.com/2018/03/22/delphi-visual-library-on-webassembly-platform/

[Daniel 417]

@Donald Shimoda There is no need - and in this community especially no room - for personal attacks. Being upset is one thing, but insulting does not help anyone.

[Donald Shimoda 0]

4 hours ago, Daniel said:

@Donald Shimoda There is no need - and in this community especially no room - for personal attacks. Being upset is one thing, but insulting does not help anyone.

@DanielYes you are right. I will edit my post, never mind. Is ok now?

Edited June 21, 2019 by Donald Shimoda

[Daniel 417]

Yes, thank you. 👍

I do no totally agree with you, but this is clearly not the question.

[hsauro 40]

17 hours ago, WillH said:

Like Remobjects ?

https://blogs.remobjects.com/2018/03/22/delphi-visual-library-on-webassembly-platform/

Interesting, the page just gives GUI examples but i assume I could compile straight object pascal to webassembly. I should get touch with them to find out more.

Edited June 22, 2019 by hsauro

[cupwalker 5]

About this topic. I totally dumped embarcadero in my business. In the company that uses legacy software written in delphi we did buy an PERPETUAL license Rad Studio Tokyo.

And now is the best part, after a year we cannot even download the software from the customer panel in EMB, Don't even mention installing it after the limit of 5 installations. Are you serious @David Millington  @Marco Cantu (Don't take it personally but you are just the ones who read this forum from emb for my knowledge) ?

 

Please don't tell me about virtual machines etc. this isnt the case I just don't accept such a threatment (you shouldn't either) and the sales rep and technical don't respond either in increasing the limit.

 

"What is a perpetual software license?

A perpetual software license is a type of software license that authorizes an individual to use a program indefinitely. Generally, outside of termination, a perpetual software license lets the holder use a specific version of a software program continually with the payment of a single fee.

Use of traditional perpetual software licensing is declining as subscription-based pricing models become more popular. Customer's increased interest in subscriptions might be partly because perpetual licensing has a high initial cost."

"

[Brandon Staggs 277]

Perpetual license is not perpetual support. That means if your support expires you are on your own as far as keeping a copy of your installer files and what to do when you need to install again, etc. Not really a big deal when you can download the ISOs, and if you didn't do that when you bought it intending not to subscribe, that is 100% on you. As to installation limits, my understanding is that you can get that taken care of by contacting sales. Personally I really, really dislike this policy on the part of Embarcadero, but I do understand their interest in preventing licenses from being abused. Now, if they refuse to bump your activation limit, you have something worth complaining about...

[cupwalker 5]

Of course, they refuse to bump it. So there is a PERPETUAL license that is annual, rentalware, or something. Personally, I do not care anymore (just wanted to share this stuff and how it developed).

[Remy Lebeau 1393]

7 hours ago, cupwalker said:

About this topic. I totally dumped embarcadero in my business. In the company that uses legacy software written in delphi we did buy an PERPETUAL license Rad Studio Tokyo.

It is commonly recommended that you should obtain a Network Named User license instead, so that you can then manage your own licensing locally without having to contact Embarcadero.  You would just have to download and install the License Server onto a machine in your local network, and then you can issue/revoke your own licenses as needed.

[cupwalker 5]

It doesn't stand anywhere that after 5 installations/registration and a year, you can send the perpetual license to trash. And as stated below they know what an annual license is and what a perpetual is.

Just curious that there is no delphi "pro term license" and rad studio.

 

[dummzeuch 1505]

14 hours ago, cupwalker said:

It doesn't stand anywhere that after 5 installations/registration and a year, you can send the perpetual license to trash. And as stated below they know what an annual license is and what a perpetual is.

Just curious that there is no delphi "pro term license" and rad studio.

 

If that's the case, take them to court. I'm pretty sure that's illegal in most countries.