Updated Community Edition

[Silver Black 23]

Why a Delphi 10.4.1 CE edition does not exist? The CE is still in 10.3 version... 

[Anders Melander 1782]

52 minutes ago, Silver Black said:

Why a Delphi 10.4.1 CE edition does not exist?

Because they haven't made one. Why? Only Embarcadero knows.

[Mike Torrettinni 198]

1 hour ago, Silver Black said:

Why a Delphi 10.4.1 CE edition does not exist? The CE is still in 10.3 version... 

I think 10.5 will be next CE edition, but not 100%. They are disappointed in lack of conversion from CE to full (paid) version.

 

What feature are you looking for in 10.4.1 that is not in 10.3? I'm still on 10.2.3.

[Anders Melander 1782]

43 minutes ago, Mike Torrettinni said:

They are disappointed in lack of conversion from CE to full (paid) version.

What's your source for this?

If that is the case then I'm disappointed by their lack of understanding of the ecosystem they're a part of and their own position within it.

These days, from my POW, given the entry level price of Delphi, the best they can hope for with a free version is to keep Delphi alive by seeding knowledge of it, and what it can do, into the younger generations. Nothing is lost by giving it away for free to those that can't afford it anyway.

 

I think the $5000 limit on the CE edition is a reasonable rule but thinking that it will cause much conversion is IMO naive.

[Darian Miller 361]

3 hours ago, Silver Black said:

Why a Delphi 10.4.1 CE edition does not exist? The CE is still in 10.3 version... 

I believe it was stated that CE will remain one full version behind the current.  So, when 10.5 gets released then CE will be upgraded to 10.4.

[David Schwartz 426]

The most in-demand jobs today are pretty much tied to languages and platforms that are all free. 

 

People who have jobs in the Delphi world use the tools that their employers provide them. All of the jobs I've had used the Professional Edition. Virtually all of them could be back-ported to D7 with very few problems because that's where they came from, and nobody added anything newer to the code except for the occasional properties added to things like stringlists and whatnot.

 

I have made a practice of keeping my own license current for most of the past several years (while I could afford it) but I have not met anybody I've worked with who was a Delphi dev who had their own license. When I'd ask, they'd ask me "Why should I?" At some point the price would come up and they'd say that most jobs are using older versions, or at least evolved from older versions and don't use newer stuff, so having the latest version is really a non-issue except for certain libraries that need it.

 

The place I'm working at now hired me in January as a Delphi expert because the guy who had been maintaining their code for the past decade left the prior October. My second day, I was told, "DO NOT TOUCH ANY OF THE PRODUCTION CODE!" That has been repeated verbally and in writing many time since. The guy before me started looking into moving to D10.3 but never made the shift even though the company maintains their maintenance agreements and gets the updates. We're still on 10.2.3. Another guy was doing some Delphi work, and we were asked by management if there was any good reason to move up to 10.3, and we both said, "Nope" and that was that. I honestly don't know why they hired me. There are plenty of problems with their software, but they refuse to let me touch any of it. I'm pretty confident they could roll it all back to D2010 and it would compile without any problems. (They use a few generics classes here and there.)

 

All this to say, if Embt has a marketing strategy for growing the market for Delphi other than encouraging existing customers to keep their maintenance agreements up-to-date, I don't know what it is. They raise the price of the maintenance 4% annually, keep trying to push people to upgrade for a bunch of features nobody's using, and I've never seen more than a dozen Delphi jobs listed on job boards in years -- and many of them are for the same positions by different agencies. (Most of whom are run by east Indians who almost always end up saying the client is not able to pay more than $20/hr for someone with 10+ years of experience -- telling me they're running a H-1B scam to justify hiring their buddies from back home.)

[Mike Torrettinni 198]

32 minutes ago, Anders Melander said:

What's your source for this?

If that is the case then I'm disappointed by their lack of understanding of the ecosystem they're a part of and their own position within it.

These days, from my POW, given the entry level price of Delphi, the best they can hope for with a free version is to keep Delphi alive by seeding knowledge of it, and what it can do, into the younger generations. Nothing is lost by giving it away for free to those that can't afford it anyway.

 

I think the $5000 limit on the CE edition is a reasonable rule but thinking that it will cause much conversion is IMO naive.

I completely agree with you, that's why I hope CE is coming back with 10.5 and will be released with every single version. This should be long term plan, not important to yearly sales reports on conversion.

 

[Anders Melander 1782]

15 minutes ago, David Schwartz said:

keep trying to push people to upgrade for a bunch of features nobody's using

How do you know what people are using? I think it widely depends.

 

A few years ago I worked at a place where we stuck with XE and XE2 because the later XE versions sucked. I doubt that they have updated since then but I would have updated them to 10.3 if I had any involvement with them anymore.

At my previous job we were around 30 developers all using 10.3.

At my current client we're using most of what the 10.3 language and RTL provides and when we've done our next major release I expect we will all update to 10.4.

[Darian Miller 361]

This was from the Q&A on the 10.4 Release Webinar back on May 27, 2020:

Quote

 

Q: When we can expect Community edition of 10.4 available?

 

A: Hi, 10.3.3 versions of Delphi and C++ Builder Community Edition remain available for download. 
10.3.3 was an excellent release and Community Edition users can perfectly well continue to work with that release. 
The majority of customers who need the best performance, quality and features should be able to purchase the latest release. 
Our paying customers deserve a premium experience. 
That, coupled with increased non-compliant usage of Community Edition (which we're actovely addressing with our legal team), has resulted in delaying a new release of CE. 
Over the coming months, we'll determine when a 10.4 version of CE will be released.

 

 

[David Schwartz 426]

1 hour ago, Anders Melander said:

How do you know what people are using? I think it widely depends.

 

Well, yes, that's obviously from my own perspective. I've worked on about a dozen different projects over the past 15 years, give or take. They were all written in the D4-D7 days, and none of them used newer features of the language, RTL, or the newer stuff added to the Ent. Ed. b/c they only used the Pro Ed.

None of the devs I've worked with over the years showed any interest in Delphi oustide of work, and they were mostly unaware of newer features. They did their work and went home.

 

Most of the excitement I'm seeing online comes from places like Brazil and Belgium. 

 

The jobs I hear about are all the same -- maintaining 10-15 yo code bases with minimal new development going on. The last three places have gotten increasingly militant against cleaning up / refactoring old code. The current place has flatly forbidden me from touching anything even though things are broken, customers are complaining, the Exec Team is pissed off, and the Dev mgr is trying to figure out ways to fix stuff other than touching the code. Go figure. It makes no sense to me. 

 

It's nice to know there are a few of y'all who are actually creating new stuff and using the latest language features. That's why I like hanging out here. 🙂 

 

[Silver Black 23]

5 hours ago, Mike Torrettinni said:

I think 10.5 will be next CE edition, but not 100%. They are disappointed in lack of conversion from CE to full (paid) version.

 

What feature are you looking for in 10.4.1 that is not in 10.3? I'm still on 10.2.3.

I have to reinstall it because the one-year-license is over, so I just looked for the most updated one.

By the way, I hate the fact that it's mandatory for you to reinstall the CE after one year. Totally nonsense. 

[Edwin Yip 154]

7 hours ago, Anders Melander said:

What's your source for this?

If that is the case then I'm disappointed by their lack of understanding of the ecosystem they're a part of and their own position within it.

These days, from my POW, given the entry level price of Delphi, the best they can hope for with a free version is to keep Delphi alive by seeding knowledge of it, and what it can do, into the younger generations. Nothing is lost by giving it away for free to those that can't afford it anyway.

 

I think the $5000 limit on the CE edition is a reasonable rule but thinking that it will cause much conversion is IMO naive.

I think you are right.

I've seen more new open source projects appear on github since the first CE edition.

The CE edition should be aiming at keeping Delphi alive and payback in the future, not to generate short-term revenue.

Edited December 13, 2020 by Edwin Yip

[dummzeuch 1505]

9 hours ago, David Schwartz said:

The guy before me started looking into moving to D10.3 but never made the shift even though the company maintains their maintenance agreements and gets the updates. We're still on 10.2.3.

Wow, after the first sentence I thought you were talking about Delphi 2007 or even older.

We recently started to move to 10.2 after never finishing the move to XE2.

And no, in this case it wasn't management who delayed this, it was me. It took a long time to get to a state where I am confident that the current code base can be moved to Unicode without breaking it all over the place. On the other hand I am currently working with Delphi 2007 again on one of the older tools where I'm again not confident enough that it won't break moving it up to 10.2. Maybe that's a mistake, I should probably just work with 10.2 and only go back to 2007 if there are any problems.

Given the impression of 10.3 and 10.4 stability I got from working on GExperts, I'm not even considering going to anything more recent. Theming seems to have broken so much of the IDE, it's not funny.

Back to the topic of CE: I seriously doubt that we will see a 10.4 CE before 10.5 (or wherever it will be called) becomes available. And I will be surprised if that happens even then.

(Just in case anybody is wondering: No, I have no inside information from Embarcadero, I'm not even an MVP or in the beta test. All this is simply my opinion and observation.)

[Clément 148]

One can only hope Emb will keep the CE project alive!
Some friends and ex-coworkers had to move to VS over the past few years are using CE to built secondary projects, mostly indoors, so no real revenue comes from it. 
The unexpected factor came from VS programmers that liked working with Delphi, and actually enjoyed programming. Last I heard from them, they were considering buying licenses for a second mainstream project.

4% annual increase is nothing compared to what we are going through here ( Brazil ). The exchange rate went from 4.3 to almost 6 in the past 10 months... Almost 40% increase, given that our salaries are frozen, and most companies are revising they contract fees downwards, it's already a problem. If you consider that Emb also increases the license value, it's not crazy to expect over 60% increase in an year. This makes even the professional SKU too expensive for ISV and small companies to afford.

Several companies, either I worked for, or friends I worked with, won't move passed XE because Delphi ecosystem is too expensive. The value of the upgrade (XE to 10.x) + 3rd party components( XE to 10.x) + retesting (Changes since XE) is more expensive than the project budget itself, and I'm talking about almost an year project timeframe. Those moved for good to MS which offers more products for the same value ( not only language, but access to all Microsoft product line and support).

 

There's still a lot of bureaucratic work to package good cost/benefit SKU. Delphi is still using the same SKU model for decades. Someone have to tell them the market had changed since then.
Students and teachers must rediscover delphi. Managers must be confident the investment/product quality in Delphi will meet or exceed expectations.
Not easy at all.
 

Edited December 13, 2020 by Clément

[Rollo62 536]

4% increase is not much ...., but I think its tendency and message  is totally  wong.

It should be -4% for a long term subscription.

I am paying the fee already many years now, and I see this more as an investment into a bank account.

Instead of getting benefit and interest as long term  subscriber, I get squeezed as much as possible.

Why are some of the best MVPs and supporters not on subscription, always with the latest Version ?  

Thats a shame for Emba, IMHO.

Something must be wrong with their pricing and long term customers binding strategy. 

They will face reality in hard times like nowadays, when customers have to decide which of their expenses were absolutely necessary,

and which can be abandoned. 

 

 

[Anders Melander 1782]

2 hours ago, Clément said:

Someone have to tell them the market had changed since then.
Students and teachers must rediscover delphi. Managers must be confident the investment/product quality in Delphi will meet or exceed expectations.
Not easy at all.

Yeah, reality' a bitch.

Embarcadero has changed things to the better, I'll give them that; Remember how bad things were back when the idiots chased the enterprise market. Inprise? What a farce.

 

I agree that they need to recapture the hobby and amateur segment. They're not Microsoft so the decision to use Delphi will not come from the top. It will have to come from the bottom, from the developers.

 

The $99 strategy worked for Borland with Turbo Pascal but it would not work today. They can no longer expect to sell a gazillion licenses of a cheap tool because of the competition from other cheap or free tools. It would also have to be so crippled that nobody would use it.

No. Not easy at all.

[Silver Black 23]

Anybody remembers when Delphi 6 had the "Personal" edition that was completely FREE? I started from there.

[dummzeuch 1505]

Even later, there were the Turbo Explorer Editions (Delphi 2006) which were also free.

[Silver Black 23]

Good ol' times! IMHO, Delphi should have a restricted FREE environment of its IDE, to make small desktop utilities at least and for the bigger purpose of spreading Delphi knowledge to new generations of devs. If VS has that, why not to copy from it?

[Remy Lebeau 1393]

On 12/12/2020 at 3:43 PM, Anders Melander said:

A few years ago I worked at a place where we stuck with XE and XE2 because the later XE versions sucked. I doubt that they have updated since then but I would have updated them to 10.3 if I had any involvement with them anymore.

At my previous job we were around 30 developers all using 10.3.

At my current client we're using most of what the 10.3 language and RTL provides and when we've done our next major release I expect we will all update to 10.4.

At my previous employer, we were stuck at v6.0, the PTBs would never let us upgrade beyond that.

 

Personally, I never upgraded beyond XE2.

[Remy Lebeau 1393]

17 hours ago, Silver Black said:

IMHO, Delphi should have a restricted FREE environment of its IDE, to make small desktop utilities at least and for the bigger purpose of spreading Delphi knowledge to new generations of devs. If VS has that, why not to copy from it?

That is exactly what the Community Edition is.

[Silver Black 23]

6 hours ago, Remy Lebeau said:

That is exactly what the Community Edition is.

 

No: the CE is the full RAD Studio, that expires every year! We need a much smaller one with only Delphi main core components and no-expiration license.

[Guest]

hi @Silver Black

 

an observation about CE edition (tested in my RAD 10.3 -- later, I didnt any other edition test for CE)

• I had RAD Studio 10.3.x Arch Edition, then...
  • I did the download when it was released for test it
• then, someone (in IDERA forum) ask if was possible have a FireDAC full (incluse remote access) in RAD 10.3 CE ...
  • and I said that YES, same that many others said "NO".
•  
• summary: was necessary 390MB of files to install the FireDAC from RAD 10.3.1 ARCH in CE edition!
  • and it works as expected!
    • tested using Interbase 2007 and Firebird 3.0
  • then, same with CE is possible create apps like in regular edition with database remote access!

[Lars Fosdal 1792]

That is a license breach.

[Mahdi Safsafi 225]

On 12/17/2020 at 3:37 AM, Silver Black said:

No: the CE is the full RAD Studio

AFAIK, there is no CE for RAD Studio ! There is only CE for Delphi or C++Builder and you can't have both.