At the 2004 Borland Conference, the company announced that it was forming a Kylix Community Project to involve a number of leading Kylix developers in decisions involving how to keep the product alive and how the developer community could contribute to the project. Apparently one of the ideas at the time was that if Borland kept the compiler up to date, the community could take care of the libraries, as the CLX library is already in a sort of open source state. I was involved in this project. Apart from a few emails asking when things would get started, nothing happened. We apparently waited forever while someone in Borland's legal department figured out the issues with Trolltech regarding the use of Qt. Since the project head, Chad Hower, moved to Microsoft last year everything has come to a complete stop.
Now I'm asking Borland (and its new CEO, who has/had an involvement with Trolltech) to take some steps regarding this product, which I still use almost on a daily basis and I'm quite happy with. We need a roadmap, along with the Delphi one. Or, as an alternative, an exit strategy. If we know Borland doesn't care any more for sure, we'd at least like to know whether there is anything they can release open source and figure out by ourselves what to do next.
But if Borland is smart, in my opinion, they will indeed keep the product alive. Does this meaning creating a new Linux IDE (the current one refuses to start on most recent distributions)? Not at all. Does it mean update CLX to Qt3? Not at all. All I need (and I think I'm not alone) is an updated compiler. One that solves a couple of subtle issues with recent kernels and (more importantly) updates the language to Delphi 2006 for Win32. I hate being unable to use inlines, strict private, for..in loops and features like these in a server side project I build both on Windows and Linux.
Udpating the compiler will be enough. The libraries, even the core ones, can be taken care of by the community. As for the IDE, I use Delphi 2006 for Linux development, not even with third party plug ins. I have the source code on a shared directory on the server (using samba), open the directory directly from the IDE (benefiting from all of the smart editing features of Delphi 2006), and then use a terminal session (with putty) to compile. OK, I have to manually jump to error lines and I have no debugger, but that's something I can bear.
Anyone from Borland? Can I have a one-to-one interview with the CEO even if I'm not an employee? But please, no whining posts or Borland-lousy.marketing posts in the feedback... I guess for other posts we've had enough and I mostly disagree with the tone! Here I want to hear your positive proposals.