A very gracious offer Richard!
>From my point of view as a small commercial software house there is no way we would offer open ended bug fixes for any of our software UNLESS there was an ongoing support fee being charged. It is just not feasible to charge enough money upfront to provide open ended support forever - you would price yourself out of the market because most people wouldn't place enough value on that. And in fact most customers would upgrade to the newer versions anyway so the high upfront purchase costs would end up subsidising the few customers who stay on the oldest version to the detriment of the majority who upgrade. That's not to excuse Borland for selling Delphi 8 and Delphi 2005 and then washing their hands of the mess... if you sell software THAT BAD then you should go into major damage control and try to do something about it even if it does hurt your bottom line majorly. Obviously Borland didn't and I think it cost them a lot (for example we used Delphi 5 and would have been ripe for an upgrade around about Delphi 8/2005 but we saw the roadkill and stuck with Delphi 5 until very very recently). However to pin the Delphi 8/2005 debacle on Embarcadero is harsh. On the OTHER hand (I have a lot of hands here), Embarcadero started this discussion by refusing to upgrade Delphi 8 and Delphi 2005 anymore. As people have said in this thread, that is provocative. There probably aren't that many people using Delphi 8 and 2005 now (hopefully none for Delphi 8?) but given how bad it was it would have made sense for them to extend upgrades back that far. I'm sure the main thrust of their strategy is to try to budge people still on Delphi 4-7 anyway so it wouldn't have hurt them much if at all. That's my 17c. David. From: delphi-boun...@delphi.org.nz [mailto:delphi-boun...@delphi.org.nz] On Behalf Of Richard Vowles Sent: Saturday, 19 September 2009 7:13 p.m. To: NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List Subject: Re: [DUG] A change in upgrade policy coming from Embarcadero And Paul, given your incredible civility in this conversation thus far and dealing with my outburst of grumpiness with a very well worded email, I will get Developers Inc to order you a Pro upgrade free of charge (we will pay for it ourselves). Please let me know in email directly what version you would like and where to ship it to. And no, I'm not doing it for anyone else - you guys need to take it up with Borland :-) They'll probably try and sell you COBOL.NET Richard
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