[DUG] Budget/Turbo editions of Delphi

[John Bird]

If Turbo versions of Delphi are not available, it is a great idea to have 
them as PR to get students getting free versions to learn on.  Without 
Embarcadero losing money on commercial sales.

Interested to hear others ideas how such editions could work.

My ideas:

-Preventing installation of components as in the past is simple - but some 
large scale commercial programs could still be made, so I think it needs 
more.

-Either disabling printing if included (Rave reports) or all printing 
carries a water mark "Student Edition - not for commercial use".

-All program windows contains some signature eg "Student edition" in the 
title bar

-some smart restrictions on what can be produced.......eg cheap or free DB 
licences limit to often only 5 connections.   Maybe limit units to 4000 
lines of code, or forms to 30 components total, and listviews and grids to 
200 lines,

-Programs might only run for 1 hour maximum and exit with a reminder screen, 
or will not run at all after say 1-2 years.

-Alternatively charge strictly on a usage basis - eg start with $20 free 
credit.  Every compile takes 10cents of credit, every debugger run takes 20 
cents off, editing takes off 1 cent per hour.  When credit is used up IDE 
stops working, and you have to uninstall and reinstall.   (Transaction based 
charging like this is a favourite of mine, incorporated into some of my 
programs).

-Expiry date on IDE, have to uninstall and reinstall to get more.

-Student edition could cost say $25 or be free, depending on how restricted.

A combination of more than one of these would mean commercial developers 
would still get the real versions, and be not too mean on students.

Choose what is good to limit, and let them otherwise have a fully functional 
version - in reality they won't be writing very large programs, so that is 
what to limit.

Personally I would favour the combination of
-Watermarks on printing
-limits on grid size and number of components on a form
-programs run for 1 hour maximum.

John