So you feel part of the Delphi community and wish Delphi will survive (and prosper) after Borland sale... what should you do? Wait and see how things evolve or start acting now?

Buy, Write, Read, Publish, Help... don't Wait!

If you don't have Delphi 2006 and feel you need it (it is indeed a very good release), buy it right away, don't wait. If you have written material on Delphi, publish it right away (I'll do my best to finish my Delphi 2006 ebook ASAP). If your fellow programmers don't know Delphi, show it to them right away. If you are thinking of an open source project made with Delphi, go on sourceforge and open it (there are already 2,031 project related with Delphi). If you have written a great component, make it available or start selling it. If you help others in newsgroups keep doing it. If you don't do it, start doing it now. Don't sit, act.

Everything we do to make the community stronger in the coming months will be a benefit, whatever happens with the ownership of the Delphi product (particularly if some independent investor buys it, as David I mentioned in some of his recent newsgroup posts). Don't listen to doom sayers, listen to the positive feeling the R&D team is showing in their blogs and elsewhere.

Stand Up and be Counted

There are thousands of Delphi applications out there, including many notable ones. You can find the best list on the site http://delphi.wikicities.com. I renew the appeal I wrote years ago (in 1999) for BDN to “Stand Up and be Counted”, add any relevant application to the site above or let us revise one of the other similar sites (mentioned at the beginning). The list is impressive: Skype, Jabber, QuickBooks Point of Sale, Spybot, Copernic Desktop Search, Macromedia Captivate, Avant Browser, The Bat!, XanaNews, FeedDemon, Topstyle Pro, PowerArchiver, ZipGenius, Ares Galaxy...

Delphi Core Platform

P.S. I have an addendum to the Delphi dream post: what about a “Delphi Core Platform” fully free for everyone to download, with some free personalities (C++, Python, an XML editor, an HTML one...) maintained by open communities and a set of personalities sold on a subscription basis by the DelphiNewCo?