Fan Mail: Your money or your job

Your reviewer got some email asking about costs:

Your reviewer was amused the past few weeks over the new Delphi 2010 and supposedly new "copy-protection" features found in Delphi 2010. No, really.

Your reviewer was amused over the people who downloaded Delphi 2010 (illegally) and then used an "illegal" version of Delphi 2010. Wait a minute, illegal copies? Most Delphi programmers keep very "high standards" and claim they buy all original versions of Delphi, and all their 3rd party libraries are all licensed (yeah, right). Or that most of the people you see on the newsgroups are a legitimate bunch...

Let's see now... nearly every year, you have to pay money to Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/Embarcadero for fixes and update whether you like it or not, and then to the 3rd-party-component vendors for more updates, and then your developers, the rent, salary, and other things before you even earn a single penny.

Let's say, to license Delphi Enterprise 2010 costs US$2500, just getting a decent grid, report writer, and all those stuff costs another US$3000 (+/-), and your own overheads costs US$3000, you would probably end up - with this bad economy - with no money or your housed is going to get forclosed, or you lost your job, or under lots of pressure to deliver.

Now let's say you hire another person to do your work, gee, that would costs thousands (in overheads) just to hire that person. If you hire a team of Delphi developers, either your company must be damn rich to afford all those licenses, or going to go bankrupt over all those costs.

The past few years, many of the 3rd-party library vendors have been increasing prices, or switching over to an annual software ass-u-rance (SA) license.

Examples are DevExpress (yearly fees), RemObjects (software subscription), IPWorks (RedCarpet Subscription), ElevateSoft to name a few. The end result? You end up paying over-and-over again. Gone are the days you pay once every 2 or 3 (or maybe 4 or 5) years.

Your reviewer was very amused with the software call-home feature, where the software calls home. This started with TeeMarch's TeeCharts Pro version, where the serial numbers are validated on-line, or RemObject's software validating on-line, and then DevExpress and so on...

The big boys want their share too...
Now in comes CodeGear and they want to be paid too., what will happen? There would be plenty of requests for "illegal" copies of Delphi, and then, when suddently, when the software is "secured enough", there are no more illegal versions.


Your reviewer thinks these things will happen:

1) Newer copies of Delphi will call home, and then start recording all the information necessary for the lawyer to launch a lawsuit against those people using "illegal" Delphi versions.

2) The number of people using Delphi will probably reduce, notably, the people being Technology Vendors / Tool Vendors will probably decrease. Since few people can earn enough to pay for all of those licenses, the number of jobs will decrease.

[It will be good to notice a reduction of Delphi developers. That means those blow-hard Joes and "Delphi-Forever" people will have a new reason to get a proper job, and stop wasting time on the newsgroups :) ]

Since new developers who know C++, C# and VB.NET, PHP and Java earn soooo much money from their job, switching from those languages to Delphi will mean loss of income...

3) Those who want to find work with Delphi will have to lower their expectations. Instead of high US$100,000-$60,000 jobs, they could expect their co-workers to be Sanjay* the overworked and underpaid Indian Delphi developer, or Mohammmed* the underpaid Pakistani Delphi Assistant.

* not their real names, but hey, it could be real!

4) Those who can't pay for their Delphi licenses will have to be consider a new language, such as PHP, C#, Java (or maybe VB6, VB.NET)

:)