Borland

[philipdc]

Recent announcements at Borland say that thet are about to sell their
IDE business. This impact us in that TurboCASH is developed in Delphi.
I am particlualry putting this into TurboCASHZone (The business group)
and not TurboCASH (the developer group)

This posting is from Dave Catell an IT consultant in Christchurdh, New
Zealand.

David Cattell wrote:

> It's a pity. If TC were developed in Java you'd be smiling already. Your biggest threat at this point would appear to be the future of Delphi. Even if it gets taken over (and not left to languish, as I expect will happen) it's difficult to imagine a strong path ahead. Perhaps the answer would lie for someone to use it to create a migratory path for developers on to another platform that has a sound future (like Java)? The point is that without any of this known, one of your two biggest assets (being the historic development - i.e. now having the product tried and tested - and your user base) - and at this stage, it being the bigger one of the two - is seriously under threat. That's not to say that the assets value is at threat of disappearing into thin air overnight, but the threat is that you'll be forced to invest a whole heap more to migrate the whole product over to something like Java. This would be too much to expect of any OS developer community, surely?
>
> At this stage, one has little choice but to wait and see - although regardless, I cannot imagine Delphi becoming any stronger or worthy of any future following.
>
> I've now been through your 40-pg version. It's interesting. Perhaps the biggest value, at this stage, lies in a Google of this world simply taking the whole project over, redeveloping TC (away from Delphi and on to a platform that has mass OS developer support) and then feeding it to their existing massive user community. If they were to have a clear strategy on how to make money out of such users (via value-added support, or add-ons, or stationery, or upgrades...) they might be able to seriously ruffle the feathers of the establishing folk like Sage.
>
> An open-source entry-level accounting system does make sense to me and you have the asset to facilitate an easy entry for someone who has the marketing clout. Just a pity that you're stuck with Delphi. That could change though. Let's see what Borland decides.

[Jan Verlaan]

This message from Borland reached me and Pieter last week too.
From business point of view we are already on the right track to tackle
this issue.
TurboCASH is moving it's Borland BDE out of the application to connect
it's data to the opensource database Firebird.
This will allow us with minor code rewrite to move away to the
opensource development environment Lazarus.
It also opens the way to link other development environments to the
database like php or java.

My conclusion is that we are on the right way to NOT walking into a
possible problem by the Borland Delphi sale.

With kind regards,
Jan

[philipdc]

I have watched with interest the Borland moves lately. While it does
impact the long term future, see my posting calling for Borland to Open
Source Delphi.

http://threads.borland.com/threads/threads.exe/view?commentid=38918&view=short

Develeloper issues are important. We currently ahve 96 Develoeprs
registered onteh project mailing list. However far more inportnat to us
is the Hundreds of consultnats and 50 000 pljus users that carry within
themsleves the TurboCASH Business Logic.

We do very simple thing - Post Transactions into Accounts - what makes
TurboCAHS uniqie it that we can do it on many lanigages adn many
markets, and we can do it at a prioce that makes the other guys think
they are competing against socks comming from China.

The Code in fact can easily be recereated (Simply by adding money). The
mindeshare of the TurboCASH project members - that is where the Gold
is.