[DUG] A change in upgrade policy coming from Embarcadero

[Jolyon Smith]

My point w.r.t community code having found its way into the product was
two-fold:

1)  Having taken from the community you might be forgiven for thinking that
Embarcadero might feel some gratitude if not obligation to foster that
community.  Sure they don't *have* to, but then they - and everyone else -
has to accept that the less they get from the community, the more they have
to put in themselves (and the more everyone has to pay as a result).

2)  How many potential great contributions are lost because the people that
might have come up with them are pushed away by the pricing and will be
pushed away by the more restrictive upgrade policy, should it materialise?



As for taking the pulse of the community.

I never thought I'd say it, but newsgroups are frankly "old hat".

Stackoverflow and the blog-o-sphere is where it's at these days for me at
least.

I used to be very active in the NGs, checking them every day because that's
where the news, discussion and support and was mainly to be found but I
can't remember the last time I could be bothered installed Gravity and
logging on to an NNTP server.

Nowadays DelphiFeeds gives me my news fix, blog comments (and my own blog)
give me a far richer channel for discussion and my urge to help people is
satisfied by stackoverflow (that was the final piece in the jigsaw that I
only relatively recently popped back into place).

I'd say I personally am more active "communitywise" now, even though one
metric of that - NG activity - would now be registering a flat-line.

Perhaps you just don't hang out where the cool kids are these days?

:)


> Given stuff away doesn't necessarily mean it will instantly create a
> community.

Maybe not, but neither will overcharging.


> Half the problem with the "free" or "cheap" versions of the
> products was that they were featured enough that most commercial
> developers didn't need to purchase a license for the PRO or greater
> items 

Strangely I never met anyone who used the Personal Edition.  All the people
I know who do Delphi in their spare time are Pro users.  Fewer and fewer of
them are on the current version though, citing cost and relevance
(previously the .NET emphasis, more recently Unicode is the headache we
could have done without in many cases).

Your mileage clearly is different from mine.