Borland C++Builder Revolt 95
florescent_beige writes "Developers using Borland's C++Builder RAD tool are in revolt. Borland apparently obsoleted this product one year ago. However, the promised migration path (to be described in a now infamous open letter) never materialized.
In a last-ditch effort to convince Borland to support them, users have put together a letter justifying (and begging) for continued support."
Begging is not freedom. (Score:4, Insightful)
Poster writes
Slashdot places this story in the "fight-the-man dept.".
Asking or begging a proprietor to do what you want is not fighting anyone, it's acknowledging that you are not livin in freedom. Placing yourself in a dependant position by not choosing free software [gnu.org] to do the job doesn't bode well for leveraging a free market to supply the desired changes or improvements. Ironically, all the customers the letter cites are capable of paying for the support they want. Perhaps these developers should put some money and/or time into getting someone to distribute a free software program that does what they want so they won't be in this position.
this is why open source rocks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Same old Borland (Score:1, Insightful)
Evaluating Borland's recent actions in light of their overall history, it seems fairly obvious to me what the fumble was this time: Borland gets chummier with Microsoft and completely swallows the
The BCB community is grudgingly accustomed to taking a back seat to the Delphi crowd, but even so, CBX isn't received well at all. The Delphi people like the
At least the JBuilder fans don't seem to have to deal much with this kind roller coaster ride. But for a while some Borland observers were wondering if Borland was considering dropping BCB and even (gasp!) Delphi to become an all-Java vendor.
These Borland snafus and mixed signals are indeed typical. It's almost as though there's some Borland-specific el nino that turns things upside down every now and then. Just wait a year - the weather will change.
T
wxPython and Boa Constructor (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps Anjuta [sourceforge.net] would be more use to them in conjuncion with gcc? Here [sourceforge.net] are the features and here [sourceforge.net] is the eye candy.
Products like C++ Builder are not only fancy IDEs and compilers, but they come with very rich class libraries. If someone has invested years of development time creating applications using these class libraries, thier discontinuation is a disaster if they are to continue to develop their application without rewriting it from scratch using different libraries, or in a whole new language environment.
Re:Begging is not freedom. (Score:3, Insightful)
If the company (READ FOR MORONS: developers) do not feel like supporting the software, then THEY STOP.
What does the free market dictate? YOU GO SOMEWHERE ELSE (READ FOR MORONS: take your business somewhere else). Stop acting like you have a damn clue.
Whether you take your "business" to free software or not is your choice. THAT IS FREEDOM.
You damn hippies are just tools.
Re:Begging is not freedom. (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously that's a limited example, but the Open source example also assumes there is a recent mirror and that you are willing to do it. A lot of people actually have jobs, and do not have the time to redevelop/reverse engineer applications for a feature that just should be there, but that does not have to be there (one of those things that makes life a little bit easier).
Plus, have you looked at many OSS source code recently? I have, and most of them are very poorly documented, especially in terms of commented code (even Apache 2; I was looking at the AliasMatch code).
The beauty of OSS is that the option is available, but in way too many cases the time it takes to learn a crappy code base is not worth the effort. Look at the Blog implementation, WordPress. It's great if you want exactly what it has to offer. However, if you don't then you have to go searching for where functions are declared and track through the dependencies, not to mention the spaghetti code! I was able to get it to what I wanted, but that's one of those wonderful OSS things that everyone brags about and it is a web.
Borland cannot be trusted (Score:1, Insightful)
Borland has killed off : Codewright, Kylix,C++Builder
and left their developers high and dry.
Their flagship Delphi fails to work on XP systems
with the latest SP 2 applied.
They have long promised and failed to deliver
Compact Framework support in Delphi
Their head of Borland Developer Network, John Kaster is alternatively rude to or dismissive of developers
legitimate concerns.
All these are signs of a company in decline and serious internal disarray.
I would suggest that anyone thinking of using or continuing to use Borland products have a good long hard think about the consequences of their decision.
Just look at how Kylix and B++ Builder developers have
been abandoned. Some of us are desperate, we have large codebases that we foolishly wrote in Borland C++ Builder.
Now our codebases have been orphaned.
Switching to Visual Studio
Borland, you have burned developers once too often.
Re:Borland dead? I don't think so. (Score:2, Insightful)
Consider contributing to the Freepascal and Lazarus open source projects.
Re:Borland dead? I don't think so. (Score:1, Insightful)
You may not like C++, but C++Builder is still a great tool, and despite the uncertainty it's still one I recommend to people.
One possible 'upgrade' route for BCB users is to port their code to Delphi. All your GUI will still use the VCL, so there's some simple C++ > Pascal 'recoding' involved there, and if you can encapsulate large chunks of your C++ code into DLLs or packages, you can call that from Delphi with few problems - in theory.
But, the main reason that approach scares the shit out of me is that Borland could just as easily pull the plug from Delphi as well. BCB isn't being canned because it's rubbish, it's being canned because Borland can't make a 'compelling business case' NOT to can it.
"Developer Tools" are only 30% of their turnover nowdays - they're focused on 'enterprise', 'alm' and 'SDO' (whatever that is - investor-attracting snakeoil, I suspect)