Yes, all links on the Turbo Delphi download, now merely point to a 30 day trial of Delphi 2010!.
So, they have shrunk the market base significantly. What CAN they be thinking ?

The good news, is Lazarus/FPC continues to improve, and the latest builds are reported to import Delphi projects more cleanly.

Which brings us back to the starting open letter :
I would like to see a smaller-step, (more politically palletable?) which would be :
The release of Delphi 7.1 as a web release education/hobbyist level product. NOT as cripple-ware ( See Xilinx WebPack SW for an example)

Sometimes personal Delphi release is done piecemeal via magazines, but that is too transient – but a precedent already exists.

My experience: Having cut my teeth on Borland products, and supported commercial products using them, they were a natural choice when I went looking for some Open Source / Community projects to enhance into Bench Measurement and Solar-Experiment/Research applications.
First pass is going to be a ‘Sound-card’ instrument package, as sound cards give good precision, and are everywhere.

The objective here is to get students/schools working with _simple_ software, and that same sw can be a university level project target.

Targets: This software should be a step above console, but not fluff-heavy, and it should run on a Flash Drive. (ie ideally stand-alone EXE)
The Tools should be easy to download, _and_ should run on a Flash-Drive.
The SW should also not be PC-age paranoid – ie work across a wide range of operating systems. Linux support is a plus, but certainly not vital.

Easy, one would think ?

This is what I found, thus far, on the Community landscape:
FreeBASIC :
Pluses: Simple, compact, and works really great on Serial/parallel port projects. Good community forum support.

Minuses: Still improving, lacks a Step-Debug, GUI angle not good, and it’s not Pascal.

FreePASCAL/Lazarus:
Pluses: It IS (largely) portable pascal, it does have a Step-debug, and can import Delphi projects. It is quickly becoming the platform of choice for many community projects. Good community forum support.

Minuses: Not 100% Delphi-version portable (but neither is Delphi itself!)
Code is large by default, but can be stripped to be smaller.

Microsoft Free Editions:
Pluses : They are free, and will actually import/run most projects.
(so seem to have better time-line migration than Delphi)
I was left more impressed than I expected to be.

Minuses: From Microsoft, and a tad large/slow. A couple of times I thought
they had hung. They are also not pascal.

Turbo Delphi:
Pluses : Free download
Minuses: Sadly disappointing. It is HUGE, insists on adding Microsoft Bloat (NET 1.1 stuff, that is now close to obsolete), and refuses to import some Delphi7 candidate projects : (
I suspect they nobbled this too much, and have turned it into a time-sink. Looks like ZERO chance of this monster of many tentacles ever launching off a Flash Drive.

Delphi 7: I have this on one hard drive, and it works great.
Sadly, I cannot move it to another PC with a better sound card, as it is install locked. I hope the hard drive does not die…

It is only a matter of time before Lazarus IS good enough to displace Delphi’s of most flavors. The Turbo Delphi fiasco has not really helped the brand, but release of a Web-Delphi 7.1 might help extend the life of the Delphi brand.

Web-Delphi 7.1 would be an easy, and safe (close to zero sales impact), small step, that would greatly help the education community.
There are some great web sites out there, using Delphi code, but no easy way for new users to actually RUN that resource.

The newest Delphi releases seem to have enough high end features, to allow a base-line web-release very similar in market-model to Xilinx’s WebPack.

That would be a natural second step.
For a forum Model, take a look at Atmel’s AVR-Freaks (and FreeBASIC )

The time could be right. Companies like Mentor get some very good PR, with free training in downturns.

[...] which might explain why it doesn’t feature that strongly in Open source offerings. I’ve long campaigned for a renewed focus on the Turbo Delphi’s or Delphi Personal editions for exactly this [...]

As to your problem with graduates; I have witnessed the same problem but from the other side. I was in an interview last week when the interviewer heard that I was interested in Delphi her only comment was “Delphi, it is cute little language but little used in the modern business world”. I fear that CodeGear’s biggest enemy at this point in time is a negative perception of increasing irrelevance in the business world. This problem could be positively attacked with a set of Turbos to get amateur developers talking about it again. The Average non-delphi developer’s perception _can_ be influenced through the increased visibility of Delphi code samples, forum postings and community activity.

In my opinion a proper set of Turbos could be developed with marketing money that would represent a better ROI than yet more high profile advertising or sponsorship.

Just before Delphi 2009 was announced, we made the decision to upgrade from Delphi 7 to Delphi 2007 (had we known about Delphi 2009, we would likely have waited six months for it). Upgrading has been a costly exercise, not just in terms of base license costs but also in the time taken to identify and acquire suitable tools and other third-party components to replace those we have been using with Delphi 7 that either don’t support Delphi 2007 or where existing code produces ‘interesting’ effects in the new IDE. If we had been able to obtain a ‘turbo’ version of Delphi 2007, it is likely that some of us would have installed this on our home PCs and therefore would have already encountered and resolved many of these issues before they became critical for our primary business.

For the past year or so we have also been trying, with very limited success, to recruit new developers. A very common response from recent graduates and junior programmers that we have approached is that they want to become developers in a ‘mainstream environment’: one they have seen (and hopefully used) whilst at university; one that is being talked about frequently on the blogs and forums they encounter; one that they can have a cut-down copy of on their own PCs at home. If it was possible to obtain a turbo edition of Delphi 2009/Prism, we are more likely to encounter enthusiasts who are talking about and using the Delphi IDE.

We don’t get these same problems with our underlying database (most people want to use Microsoft SQL, where we have the Express editions available before we even think about putting support for the new SQL server version into our software).

The main points of my letter still apply, even more so than ever if the plans in those posts are to be believed.

https://forums.codegear.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6998&#7037

https://forums.codegear.com/thread.jspa?messageID=26679&#26457

Rick Carter

@Alpay – Thank-you for any attention you are able to draw to the issue. As I said, I don’t expect to single-handedly change CG’s strategy overnight but if this even brings forward an internal meeting on the subject I’ll be happy. On the other hand, I would also love to talk to someone inside CG off-the-record about the future of the Turbos.

@Torbins – This would be favourable compared to a complete ban on 3rd Party components. However, I do still think that disallowing them altogether takes away one of the great universal selling points’s and one of the greatest advantages of using Delphi.