Quote Originally Posted by WILL View Post
Free isn't an option. They tried it and it wasn't sustainable. Judging from the conversations I've had with David over a year ago and Jim more recently, they pretty much told me that this is not something that they can do if they want to stay in business.
I understand that they can't make Delphi compleetly free as they have to pay their employee salaries somehow.
But they could atract a lot of new developers by offering free versions for students similar as microsoft is offering free editions of Windows to be used by students. More newbies atracted means bigger chances for some of them to actually buy Delphi in the first place. Having 30 day trial is just not enough.
They could always use custom license for this free editions which would not alow pepole from making any comercial software with it.
This way they make Delphi afordable for newbies. And when someone becomes confident enough that it can actually make a comercial project with Delphi it would also be prepared to pay some money for it.
That is how I finally decided to purchase Delphi XE2. I started on Delphi 6 Personal which was available as free then, moved to Delphi 7 which I also got for free and finaly when I become confident enough in my programing skils I bought Delphi XE2. If I would have to buy Delphi from the start I would have never started programming in it.


Quote Originally Posted by WILL View Post
And frankly why not pay for something of high value like developer tools if it improves the quality. So buying a set of good developer tools, I don't have a big problem with. (Considering that a lot of free versions of dev tools, esp. those from big companies are crap.)
The problem is that Delphi just isn't that high value developer tool anymore due to many bugs and poor implementations it has.
Another problem is lack of third party components and packages for Delphi. There are more and more excelent third party components developed for FPC/Lazarus but most of them doesn't support Delphi. Why? Becouse if someone wants to make their components Delphi compatible they need to purchase latest version of Delphi as trial edition time is just to short to be usefull.