Apparently, for some people, "open source" somehow is the answer to everything.

Now that Borland is trying to sell their Borland Developer Studio, there are people saying that they should just "open source" it. Right, like that is the answer.


As a developer and small time software shop, I obviously have an opinion on the subject... Care to read it? Well go ahead. Comment if you dare ;-)




My opinion, and nothing more.

First, let me state, that I do use open source software. Both professionally and on a personal level. Why? Because I can get it for free (legally) and it does the job for me. Period.

Do I support open software? Yes, I do. I'm a supporter of Firebird, obviously, and some other software as well. As you could have read in this blog earlier, we use the open source bug tracking system Mantis. I also use Open Office and several other pieces of software.

I also use shareware software and got several licenses for small tools we and I use. Works fine for me.

While developing our software, we purchased several Delphi third party component sets.

Now, do I have someone against open source? That depends.

For some pieces of software, open source can be good. However, open source does not mean "for free". There's many free software available, open source or not, but if you take it from another angle, then there is no free software.

Let me explain. Although the software might be free for you (as in: you don't have to pay for a license to use it), most - if not all - software is not developed for free. Open Office is being paid for by Sun, for example. MySQL is always mentioned as a success story on open source. Well, tough luck matey, MySQL doesn't come for free for commercial projects. And MySQL isn't being developed for free either. It's not for nothing that they got another 13M $$$ in a third (!!!) round of investments. Investors will only invest if they have the idea they'll get their money back. No chance of return? No money. Period.

Even the free-for-use software from individuals isn't truely free. They have spend hours, at night and during weekends, mostly for the fun and glory, to give you your free software package. Is that free? Well, it might be for you. But "wasting" weekend after weekend because some people enjoy your package but nothing else in return can be very very tough...

So get this and make sure to make a mental note of it: no software is free.

"Wait!", you might say, "you're wrong! What about the projects developed by individuals in their spare time?" Could be, sure, that software exists. But can you name one serious software package that's only being developed by people in their bedrooms, late at night?

Now, there's a good reason why free (open source software) is often slow in development. Given that many developers DO work in their free time, it's only a couple of hours a week they can work on a software project. Not quite enough time to compete against the big boys. Not quite enough time to go forward at a decent pace. This is why free software is always lagging behind.


Serious software takes serious time. Serious time takes away time from a normal job. Without a job, people can't pay their bills.


What many free and/or open source projects are good for, is copying existing functionality. Free Delphi-like IDE? People will answer: Lazarus. Oh great, but all it does is copying existing functionality. And at a very slow rate at that.

So, I ask you, where does the time come from to research new ideas? To actively pursue new ideas and methods?

The big corporations, my friend. That's where the money is, that's where people think up the great new ideas to put in the software we all use.

I think that Delphi would almost instantly die when it got open sourced. Seriously, think about it. Who'se going to take up the management of this enormous code base? Such a project would need funding, serious funding. Delphi needs a company behind it, a large one. With deep pockets and a long breath.

Delphi is great, I love it, and I would like to keep it my development platform. Please Borland, do not open source it!


So, what do you have to do if you like an free or open source piece of software? Simple. Throw money at it, just like you would do with closed-source-vendor-created software. Oh, I see it in your eyes: "Why would I pay for something when I can get it for free?" Simple. To speed up development. If the software is popular because it's free, even a small percentage of it's users could make a huge difference. Now, that could be the real benefit of free software. People get to know it, like it and want to support it. Yes, that would be the good thing.

As I said, I use several shareware pieces of software and are a happy supporter of paid-for software.

If it saves me time, why wouldn't I pay for it? After all, someone spend a lot of time creating it. He or she might want something in return.


Well, that's it for now. Filed this one under the new category "Ramblings". Enjoy ;-)

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Martijn Tonies

Every morning, I start by going through the newsgroups I read all day. Mostly Delphi and InterBase related.

In the Borland InterBase newsgroup, I read a post by David I from Borland, responsible for developer relations.

Shocking news. Borland is selling Delphi, InterBase, JBuilder etc, in short: all developer tools (for a copy of the post, read Firebird News).

So, what are they keeping? The so-called Software Delivery Optimization (SDO) related software. What falls under this? Lifecycle management, quality assurance, testing etc etc...

Yes, we're talking Borland here. The name we all know and love for their brilliant line of development tools.

And now, this company is selling these development tools.

I'm not that old (or at least, I like to think so), but I have been using Borland tools a bit longer than Delphi 1 was released, I started using them somewhere around Borland Pascal 7. Although there are plenty of computer programming languages to choose from, I must say I'm quite fond of Pascal (what later became "Delphi" as the language) and the Delphi developer IDE. I've been doing Delphi for years now... There was short period of pure Java server-side development as well, in JBuilder, but for the rest, Delphi all the way.

I also remember Borland becoming Inprise and wanting to focus more on the "enterprise" companies, whatever that means. Later, they turned back to the Borland name, because of developer recognition with regard to the name.

And now, with the new CEO - Tod Nielsen - at the Borland offices, they are trying to sell what used to be the core products, to an yet-un-named company. From the looks of it, I'd say "Borland", as the name, holds quite a lot of value to Tod. But he wants to keep the name, not for developers, but for ... well, for what, actually?

Many argue that this will be the best that could happen to Delphi, currently. It has been said for years that Delphi support is lacking amongst Borland management and sales staff. This sale could put Delphi back where it belongs: in a company that understands developers needs and acts to it.

But who can tell? From reading David I's replies to questions in the Borland newsgroups, he is sure a believer.

I, for one, am not so sure yet. I guess we'll have to wait until it is known who will step up and buy these wonderful tools.

Until then, let's say there's still light at the end of the tunnel.

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Martijn Tonies

Upscene Productions started "for real" over 4 years ago now. Time moves quickly when you're having fun...

During these years, there has been a steady growth in the publicity we got, the number of products and the features on each product. Today, our products are highly succesful and used by thousands around the world.

We sure are proud of this!

Nevertheless, software development isn't easy. You run into problems and - undoubtedly - your software has bugs. In addition to that, customers and potential customers request changes or new features.

If there's only 1 product you have to keep track of and you're the only one doing the job, you can do this easily. But if your company has multiple people, multiple products and you're not just selling your software for fun, it's time to move away from Notepad files and Post-its on your desktop.

Since a long time, for example, I used to keep track of all requests and bugreports in our products in Notepad files. It actually worked quite well, except for one thing. How to let your customer know that something was reported and fixed.

Some time ago, I discussed the situation here at Upscene and with other software developers and we found the Mantis bug-tracking system, a PHP-based tracker using a MySQL database.

Given that we work in different physical locations, a tracker with remote access is required. If this can be done without a complex network connection (VPN or otherwise), even better. We aren't network wizards, you know ;) And as we already had a MySQL service and PHP running for testing and the Database Developers Forum, Mantis was an easy choice.

We also decided to make our system publicly available, it runs at http://tracker.upscene.com, if you register, you can report bugs and get a notification on any changes.

We're putting everything in this tracker now and I must say I like it. It's very easy to assign items to other people, keep track of things and assign priorities. Each item now get's a number and customers get a number returned whenever they report a bug or request a feature. If they report it themselves, they will get e-mail notifications when the item is updated. They can also register interest in particular items in order to get notifications. Quite a neat system, actually.

I'm going to integrate this database with the customer web-site, so that it's easier to generate a list of items fixed in each version of our software.

Good-bye notepad files!

In short: I really like Mantis. It's open source and free for everyone to use and I'm sure that Upscene will contribute some $$$ to the project to keep it going.

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Martijn Tonies
Upscene Productions

Happy new year to everyone!

One year down, lots to go... :)

I wonder what 2006 will bring us, we're here to find out!

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Martijn Tonies

It has been ordered here at Upscene: Delphi 2006!

A bit late, I know ;)

Given that we're still using Delphi 7 for all of our products, this could be quite the change and perhaps a migration to Delphi 2006 could be done for all or some of our source code. Let's see...

One thing that needs updating, from what I've read, is our Firebird dbExpress driver. Is dbExpress finally adding some new features on the driver level? I remember "some" annoyances when it came to writing the driver... And obviously, the complete lack of documentation or decent "how to" on writing a driver. Pff... I guess this is why no-one ever published a "how to" regarding this. Everyone who figured it out by himself also figured that it's just too hard to tell anyone and let them get away with it for free!

Ah well ... we'll see what Delphi 2006 will bring us.


Oh, and before I forget: happy new year to everyone, 2006 is coming. I wonder what it will bring.
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Martijn Tonies