Marco Tech Blog

September 12, 2014

Delphi XE7 Blogs of the Week #18

A special weekly blogs posts collection focused on XE7

posted by marcocantu @ 11:11AM | 7 Comments [0 Pending]

Delphi XE7 Blogs of the Week 18 

Thanks for the links.

The first link (SD Times) isn't working. It works if 
you remove the %5C at the end.

Comment by John on September 12, 15:32

Delphi XE7 Blogs of the Week 18 

John, thanks for the suggestion. It is fixed now. 

Comment by Marco Cantu [http://www.marcocantu.com] on September 12, 16:05

What about the license forbidding the development of "application that is directly competitive to the Product or to any other Embarcadero products" 

Upgrading to XE7 may put you in the situation of 
being unable to use it for anything alike an 
Embarcadero "product" - which may mean anything from 
Delphi 3rd party tools (is a library to access, say, 
Oracle in direct competition with the C/S Pack, for 
example?) to any database product - including 
database engines that may be in competition with 
Interbase.
Also if Embarcadero delivers later something alike 
what you have developed already, you could find 
yourself in a very uncomfortable situation.
Could an Embarcadero representative clarify the 
situation? Otherwise upgrades risk to cost far more 
than their price.

Comment by Luigi D. Sandon on September 12, 19:47

Delphi XE7 Blogs of the Week 18 

Luigi,
  first of all this licensing text is not new. It was there in the same 
exact terms in XE6 and in slightly different terms in previous 
versions. This is only a clarification of previous terms.

"Anything alike" and "directly competitive" are not the same thing. 
Libraries are not products, but features within products. A library 
augments our products, is not in direct competition. And if a 
product or library doesn't augment our product but replaces it 
(you can use it without buying a license of our product), it is direct 
competition, yes.

It seems that you, like many of the commentators in non-tech, are 
also taking a quote out of context. I'm pretty sure you can take a 
sentence out of context in any license and read it the way you 
want. "Licensee acknowledges and agrees that the Product 
contains valuable trade secrets of Licensor". So if you study the 
product, and read the source code, and use it for building a 
similar product, leveraging the freely distributable RTL and VCL or 
FMX and even database components, or just copying the internal 
architecture we invented, we can complain and ask you to stop 
doing that. In a similar context, Microsoft says you cannot use 
their .NET runtime, if you are not adding a significative layer on 
top of it. But that is not quantified either.

In any case, anyone in doubt can reach Embarcadero and we can 
clarify each specific case, also in writing if requested, no problem 
at all. Licenses can be clarified and amended on request, and this 
is standard practice. I know the habit is complain first and ask 
next...

In the case of the person who raised the issue in non-tech, 
however, I have a few doubts. "Since 2007 I write IDE that uses 
pasсal-like language, uses db designer, uses form designer, uses 
report designer." If someone uses our DFM streaming technology 
for a competing IDE, what should we say? Writing a scripting 
language based on our RTL (so you get all of the functions for 
free) is honest and legal? This is not just a theory, we see this 
happening in the real world.

And for the general "other Embarcadero products" it is a way to 
generally indicate a set of different tools we produce. How do we 
protect Appmethod? A license cannot be applied to "future events 
or products" so the fact Embarcadero could buy or build other 
products in the future has no implication.

Again, this is a different wording from the past, but the base 
concept of that section of the license was already there. So I don't 
think upgrading would make a significant difference. We might as 
well revise the language in the future to further clarify the terms, 
but again, read the entire paragraph and not a single sentence and 
the concept should be rather clear.

-Marco

(PS. I won't publish comments not adding "qualified" information 
to the discussion -- to use a Microsoft restriction)

Comment by Marco Cantu [http://www.marcocantu.com] on September 12, 22:16

Series of articles on Interacting with Delphi Forms 

I've started a series of articles on interacting with Delphi forms. It may seem like a 
dull title that every Delphi programmer thinks they're an expert in, but it's really an 
inquiry into the nature of "plumbing" that exist between forms. 

There are idiomatic ways we approach interacting with arbitrary objects, and then 
there's how we deal with forms -- which are also legitimate objects -- although we 
treat them differently. This leads to problems with unit testing, excessively tight 
coupling, and other issues.

http://schwartzthink.com/2014/08/interacting-with-forms-in-delphi/
http://schwartzthink.com/2014/08/interacting-with-forms-in-delphi-part-2-
selection-forms/
http://schwartzthink.com/2014/08/interacting-with-forms-in-delphi-part-3-
initializing-forms/
http://schwartzthink.com/2014/08/interacting-with-forms-in-delphi-part-4-
initialization-methods/

Comments and feedback are appreciated.
-David

Comment by David Schwartz [http://schwartzthink.com] on September 13, 18:53

Delphi XE7 Blogs of the Week 18 

@David Schwartz: If you are going to be posting mode
Delphi content, you might want to register with
DelphiFeeds.

Comment by Bruce McGee on September 15, 20:02

Licencing question 

Hello,

you state one can get some amended or clarified
licence on request even in written. While that's nice
nearly anybody will know this. 

There's some easy way to calm down folks: add some
label below the licence in the isntaller stating that
anybody being unsure about any specific licencing
terms can contact you to get clarification, even in
written form.

- Markus 

Comment by Markus on September 15, 21:05