Vendors who stopped supporting Delphi

Vendors who went out of business
athrasoft.com - Vendor of Athrasoft Plugins
cgiexpert.com - Vendor of CGIExpert
odbc98.com - Vendor of ODBC98 - reason cited as poor or non-existent sales
classicsw.com - Vendor of Classic Component
fesoft.com - Vendor of PIMFlash
turbopower.com - Vendor of TurboPower Components
maxcomponents.net - Vendor of Max Help and Max Components
buypin.com - Vendor of B.S. components
vistadb.com - Vendor of Apollo database
asp-express.com - Vendor of classic ASP components
classicworks.com.au - Vendor of Classworks Development VCL
defined.net - Vendor of Defined Forms
dream-com.com - Vendor of Dream Company
crynesoft.com - Vendor of Genesis Component Pack
teletech-systems.com - HelpWriter application
volgadb.com - Vendor of Volga Database
DFS (Delphi Free Stuff)
animatedmenus.com - Vendor of Animated Menus - cited Poor sales
acctsync.com - Vendor of QuickBooks Components
DuckReports - Vendor of Duck Reporting Components
BalticSolutions - Vendor of ColorMemo
Helping Hands Software - n/a
UDC Corp - Vendor of MemoWriter, PowerSpreadsheet
IBrightSolutions - Vendor of Simulation Software
Unley Software - KeyDB


Vendors who stopped supporting Delphi
Softel VDM - Vendor of SftTree, SftBox, SftButton - reason cited as "massive software piracy"
AHM Tritron Tools - Vendor of AHM Components
adrock.com - Adrock Calendar Components (GPL)
tekhnologos.com - Their VCL library is no longer for licensing
SweetControls.com - Sweet Controls
degisy.com - Degisy Controls

Vendors whose Website is not updated for long time
utilmind.com
appcontrols.com
columbusoft.com, visualaccounting.com

obsoft.com - ABC Components
borshack.com
shellplus.com
VTK Tools Company - GridReport, PReport and VtkExport.
Timur Islamov - Diamond Access
Skyline Tools Imaging -> Makers of ImageLib
Dimeric Rinse
Asta - no public Delphi 2009 release (yet)
Spider Object Database
SAP/Crystal Report - their comps is Delphi 6/7.

See also: Part 2

Newsgroup Forgiveness

Your reviewer was looking at this post[1] by Mr. Simon Kissel. You might remember him in one of my blog posts where your reviewer mentions Mr. Simon Kissel got into a fight on the newsgroups and all manner of insults were said to him.

Fast forward to today, four years have passed. That is 1,460 days. Today, Mr Simon Kissel says:

No, the reason my stuff [posts] here is deleted most likely ... some people who tend not to forgive & forget past fights even after 4 years."

Now let me change topic to forgiveness. For your reviewer, it is almost 12 years had passed (4,380 days) and if your reviewer posts to Embarcadero's newsgroups today, your reviewer will get the same treatment as Mr. Simon Kissel did.

Why do I mention about forgiveness? Look at how long has passed. For Mr. Simon Kissel, 1,460 days has passed and the people on the newsgroups have not forgiven. For your reviewer, more than 4,380 days has passed and the people on the newsgroups gave same treatment to your reviewer, like as if there is no sense of forgiveness and no mercy.

Let me change topics to the religion that some of these people believe in. The Lord Jesus Christ, in his parable Matthew 18:21-35. Since many people don't read the bible, I will paste the texts here:
Then Peter approaching said to him,
"Lord, how many times will my brother sin against me
and shall I forgive him?
Up to seven times?"

Jesus says to him, "I do not tell you up to seven times,
but up to seventy times seven.
For this reason the sovereignty of heaven is like a king,
who wished to settle accounts with his servants.
As he began the accounting,
one debtor of ten thousand talents was brought to him.
And as he did not have it to pay back,
the Lord commanded him and his wife and children
and everything he had to be sold, and it be paid back.

"So the servant fell on his knees to him saying,
'Be patient with me, and I will pay back everything to you.'
And empathizing with that servant the lord released him,
and forgave him the loan.

"But going out that servant found one of his fellow servants,
who owed him a hundred days' wages,
and grabbing him he choked him
saying, 'Pay back if you owe anything.'

"So falling down his fellow servant begged him
saying, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'

"And he did not want to,
but going away he threw him into prison
until he should pay back the debt.

"So seeing what happened
his fellow servants were deeply grieved,
and coming explained to the lord themselves
everything that happened.

"Then his lord calling him says to him, 'Bad servant,
I forgave you all that debt, since you begged me to;
must not you also have mercy on your fellow servant,
as I had mercy on you?'

"And being angry his lord gave him over to the jailers
until he should pay back all the debt to him.
Thus also my heavenly Father will do to you,
unless you each forgive your brother from your hearts."
Matthew 18:21-35

Your reviewer is really sick of the contempt, ridicules and stupid remarks faced on the newsgroups. It's amazing that TeamB never cancels these manner of insults but any bad remarks to TeamB or to Borland or CodeGear or to now, Embarcadero's staff, they are just cancelled. Or how they continue this hypocrisy where there is "Delphi Love" but hate thy enemy instead.

Fast forward to the future, say, 2015. It will be almost 15 years, the same old people will be there too (except those who passed away). It will be 5,475 days and your reviewer will post to the newsgroups and no surprise, get the same shabby treatment.

Let's not talk about Lazarus and the Rich Man:

There was a rich man Delphi developer who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's Side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hell,where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.' But Abraham replied, 'Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.' He answered, 'Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.' Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.' 'No, Father Abraham,' he said, 'but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.' He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'

Which comes to the next topic. Many years ago, your reviewer was constantly arguing with one guy, who was described as a person passionate about Delphi to his very last days. I told him politely to stop his insults to me just because he don't agree with what I said. He was so full of hate that eventually I gave up posting to the newsgroup, but lo and behold - that person picked up a fight with other people too, and gave all sorts of insults, slurs and animosity such that those other people, probably stopped using Delphi altogether.

Your reviewer still remember, hi ______, I'm sorry, can you forgive me? click - the phone went dead.

There really does not need much to be said about this matter onwards and for whatever reason, five, ten or twenty years later, forget it. It's not worth saying anymore. If you cannot forgive a damn in your heart, just remember why I wrote this blog for...

Why is this called Delphi Hater's blog?

Because your reviewer is sick of the hypocrisy these Delphi-lovers give:

 - like this ridiculous software piracy issue where Mr. Kim Bo Madsen, Mr. Bruno Fiens, and others have to constantly monitor warez sites to delete the warez links,

- this money issue where the vendors are not paid and people use all illegal software instead of proper licensing,

- this attitude on the newsgroups where people who you do not agree with are treated with concept and ridicule,

- this vendor attitude where it seems like buying 3rd party is like buying used-cars, the vendor disappears, or the vendor does not fix bugs (more like extortion) except annual payments,

- this "employee" attitude where people seem to do poor works and expect high salaries.

or ... all hypocrisy in other words.


[1] https://forums.embarcadero.com/thread.jspa?threadID=40300

Embarcadero Technologies Anagram

Your reviewer was reading The Da Vinci Code and wondered if there was real-life conspiracy?

Could it be EMBARCADERO TECHNOLOGIES is an anagram for "A BORLAND HERETIC EGO COMES" and the sudden departure of Nick Hodges be the work of FreePascal users? There's a Masonic Wheeler posting here and there... Don't be surprised there's also an albino person lurking around the newsgroups too...

Maybe the holy grail is the hidden 64-bit compiler? When it comes in Sept 2012, it will be few more months before the end of the world...

:)

Spare Change

The situation is currently unfolding raises more questions than answers about Mr. Nick Hodge's departure:

• Why is there "radio-silence"(1) at Embarcadero about Mr. Nick Hodges departure? When Mr. Todd Nelson departed, there was an official press release. Nick himself had to post to the newsgroups to explain what happened.
  
  What kind of Developer Relations is it that when a senior member is let go and there are no official  announcements?
  
  
• Why is it necessary for customers to engage in "megaphone diplomacy" (2) ? Is the customer service department so tied up in bureaucracy such that customers need to post a newsgroup posting to get some help?
  
  Will the new product manager, Mr. Michael Rezlog, will customers have a kind person to turn to when they have issues?
  
  
• Why is there no sympathy and appreciation for Mr. Nick Hodges? Look at this post. What the Embarcadero people did was swat flies and post stupid newsgroup replies
  
  After Mr. Nick Hodges leaves, will Delphi developers know what's going on?
  There is still not even one single post about 64-bit Delphi yet.

Embarcadero can probably get any good manager a dime a dozen, but Nick's work is worth a nickel.


1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_silence 
2) http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/megaphone+diplomacy.html

A Nick of time

The problems with Delphi may be too great to fix

Your reviewer was saddened by Nick Hodges leaving Embarcadero. Like many others who have joined, like Mr. Chee Wee Chua (Chewy), Tod Nelson and others, it may be perhaps, the problem with Delphi lies in beyond just a single individual to change Borland's culture.

Total Eclipse of the Delphi

The problems started right after Delphi 6. For those who can remember, the best versions of Delphi was Delphi 5, Delphi 6, Delphi 7. Delphi 7 marked the "golden age" of Delphi, where you could compile once and supposedly recompile it with Kylix and almost get a working product in Linux... The bad things about Delphi is Borland's "depreciation" of many key technologies and leaving people to complain at it...

.. until Nick Hodges came and turned many things around. If there was one thing Nick did, it would be to soften the cold, hard and distasteful attitudes and behavior that persisted in Borland. Your reviewer and others who complained on the newsgroups would get cold replies and insults on Borland's newsgroups, very slow or non-existent replies to problems and issues. it became so bad, that even Mr. Luigi Sandon said that he would not even consider buying Delphi SA until many bugs are fixed. In usual newsgroup style, Mr. Luigi Sandon was told he was a troll, trouble-maker, etc. - except that if this happened on Sybase newsgroups, SAP R/3 internal customer support forums, or on other customer-service oriented companies, the offenders would have lost their job immediately.

The unlikely Nick
If Nick lost his job because of the comments on that post, other people should have taken the fall instead of him like...

• the manager of the almost-unusable-Help-Files department,
   
• the persons who answered the phone and could not call back or even send an email,
  
  
• the head of the almost useless marketing department which for some reason, can never seem to explain why Delphi has so many issues and the need to pay so much money every year without an assurance of the latest Delphi version except continuous annual payments,
  
  
• the head of the report-writer department for which your reviewer and many other people will surely uninstall Rave Reports and buy FastReports or something else,
  
  
• the head of the TCP/IP department who face the deluge of almost "every version of Indy breaks something", almost "every version of Indy has some screwball problem" issues.
  
  
• the head of the cloud department (IntraWeb) for which TeamB blogs talk about ASP.NET all the time (which tool did they use?)
   
• One slip of the tongue from Nick Hodges and everyone knows the internal bug tracker they use is based on Java/ Atlassan Jira, Confluence instead of the dummy NET1.1 Quality Central public website and the dummy DNEWS newsgroup web-gateway Embarcadero replaced,
  
  
• the head of the almost every Department which Nick Hodges has to expedite customer requests from and to.

which all leads to Nick being the fall guy for all the troubles that are happening. If there was change, change would come from getting the people to do the opposite of what they are doing now.

If there was something Embarcadero would do, it would be to find a better razor blade so that all the nicks and cuts that Nick did, would be more effective upon Embarcadero's corporate culture so that sales would increase, customer satisfaction would increase.. instead of this "megaphone diplomacy" which everything is taken to the newsgroups and this blame game starts.

Maybe get a doctor to do house-calls instead...

The week after Nick left, it is business as usual, the same old Borland appears from underneath. What would it take to improve Embarcadero's image?

• Get a group of people who are pro-customer, pro-business, pro-Delphi and press for Delphi to be used everywhere. Not ones and twos...
  
  
• Get people who are proficient in dealing with those bugs. The best thing to do is stop new developments and make a "DELPHI4EVER" with all bugs fixed and release it to every customer who has brought Delphi,
  
  
• Get a community response (with at least minimum of 50,000 respondents) to vote to get a new report writer or at least get some help to Jim Gunkel of Nevrona Reports before the Rave party ends...
  
  
• Beg, borrow or at least get some kind of ORM or Persistence Model into Delphi. It would make Delphi go BOLDLY where no Delphi has gone before.
  
  (Once your reviewer used a Visual Studio ORM product, your reviewer cannot believe how much coding your reviewer used to do to do something simple vs. almost 90% less code written)
   
• and so on...

Of course, the clock is ticking... no 64-bit Delphi, no Delphi for Linux, no Delphi for Mac...

Your reviewer hope this situation will not happen:

Doctor, doctor, Delphi has a heart attack and needs massive cash-flow infusions and new management. All the vital organs are diseased and either need to be amputated or transplanted. Delphi is in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and is in bad shape and needs "strong dose of medicine" and better Corporate governance to make sure Delphi survives... Delphi needs fresh blood, vigorous support follow-up and sales physiotherapy. Delphi needs strong antibiotics to counter bug-infested organs. New X-Ray models and PET models needs to be done and...

Let's hope the new people, for whom Embarcadero chooses, know what they are doing before it's too late.

Embarcadero was smart enough to license SalesForce and Atlassian instead of going with StarTeam, CalibreRM, and Together.

Congratulations to TMS, DevExpress

Your reviewer sees some progress with vendors implementing better protection towards their products.

My congratulation goes towards DevExpress for implementing their new Copy-protection which has seen 0 public leaks so far. There are no public leaks of DevExpress.VCL build #51 yet. They have fixed their copy-protection scheme such that leaks are afraid to release their leaks to public, for fear of being identified, people have started to beg, beg for latest version of DevExpress.VCL build #51.

My congratulation also goes towards TMS for implementing their new copy-protection scheme by reading the copy-protection ideas found on this blog. There are no more public leaks for TMS packs for latest versions.

This is good news. These vendors must be reporting new sales where there is none, people who are dishonest can no longer get free copies of these products.

Anti Piracy Technique - Watermarking Images

Your reviewer found two interesting vendors who started to get tough on leaks. I will discuss about this interesting new feature added by one of these vendors.

This vendor sells skinning and special effects libraries in Delphi. This vendor uses CCR Exif library to embed a small change into the PNG and JPG files that makes up the skins and special effects library.

What happened the next few days? Vendor releases new version of his skinning library, pirate took the bait and the vendor recovered his library package (on certain file sharing websites), opened some of the images and on next release, your reviewer noticed people were begging for the latest version.

It sure beats clicking on those Rick Roll links. Thanks goes towards Mr. Christopher R. for his excellent library.

QA Dept: IsDelphiDead.com in Denial?

IsDelphiDead.com in denial?
Your reviewer was looking at the site "IsDelphiDead.com" and there was a big "No" sign.

Is Delphi Dead? Let's take a look at the site:

The site is hosted in Linux with Apache. Along with that site, the person also uses PHP and WordPress.

The owner is a Delphi developer.

Anti Piracy Technique - Total Code Reordering.

Your reviewer found a superb example of watermarking. Your reviewer call this "Total Code Reordering", where the Implementation part of the unit is totally randomized and watermarked. This deterred some people from releasing vendor's source codes.

Who should use this?
The first person your reviewer thinks should use this is Mr. Michael Philippenko, the Fast Reports vendor. The watermarks are always removed from the files and files made public. Your reviewer won't say how exactly FR source codes are watermarked, but with this technique, Mr. Michael Philippenko can trace down who exactly leaked Fast Reports next time.


Same goes for LMD, TMS, and other vendors who sell with source codes. With the latest version of TMS, files are watermarked, but this technique goes one step further -- with all files randomized, it becomes impossible to do a "difference" search between each version to remove the watermarks in those files.

Source code preparation.
1) Split the source-codes into interface and implementation. Make a program to make 1 procedure or 1 function as 1 line entries.
2) Encrypt the files using AES with a strong key. Make sure you do not embed the key in the EXE file.


Source code install:
1) On decrypt the file, since each line = 1 entry, translate the key into an ordered scheme where you can reverse or work out back who leaked the source codes
2) Reorder the implementation section and combine with interface. It will compile since a procedure can be anywhere inside the implementation section.
3) Add your additional watermarks, etc.
4) Run the GExperts code re-format in-memory where new line on begin, new line on end option and statements on each line makes the source codes readable again and then save result file to disk.

On Software Pirate's PC:
The software pirate using Fast Report source codes is dying to release the source codes but needs to remove the watermarks. Since the source code implementation section is randomized, the compare shows many, many changes and since comparing it takes long time (have to trace many changes including new features, etc.), that frustrates software pirate and since he paid it with his money or fake credit card/ (or begged for it from vendor).

Your reviewer pays, pays, pays, the free-loaders don't. Now they will...
Every year, your reviewer pays for the licenses, there are lots of Delphi developers who have very high morale and donate lot of money to Church, etc. but do not know what the left-hand does and what the right-hand do and deny about it. These Delphi developers cheer the vendors for releasing new products, but sales are very slow.

Now that knowledge of this technique is made public, almost all the vendors will certainly implement this scheme to protect their source codes.

What will happen...
1) Developer sales will start to jump from 1's, 2's, 3's to maybe 50 or 60 copies per month.
2) With strong sales, more people get hired.
3) People will think twice about leaking source codes out.
4) Vendors who sweat blood and tears to make new products will not face what is happening today - Ruin and famine with no end in sight.