Paul
The problem with Kylix was a tiny demand for Linux Desktops, This
is compounded by Linux having no practical equivalent of Terminal
Services/ Citrix
The leap in Open Source in in apps (Thunderbird, firefox, Opera, Open
Office)
It will take years for Linux to make a dent in the desktop
Borland just misjudged this
Neven
Paul Eggleton wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on Thursday, 17 November 2005 3:29
p.m.:
That's why I'm hoping for robust Kylix support in D2006, and native
expansion into the smaller hardware.
That's what we need for continued relivency.
There's no kylix support for 2006. Kylix failed miserably. Cost
borland millions of dollars and set back Delphi development 6-12
months.
To my mind, the problems with Kylix were:
Firstly, Borland may have been marketing to the wrong people. If Borland
expected anyone to move from existing Free Software tools available on
Linux to Borland ones they were being extremely optimistic. The people
that they ought to have been targeting were people already developing
Windows software who wanted to make their applications genuinely
cross-platform.
Following from the above, the split between CLX and the VCL was too
great. There is too much work involved in trying to port an application
that makes heavy use of the VCL to CLX - they are quite different and
CLX is much more limited. Had it been much easier, it would have been
cheap for a company with even a minor interest in providing a Linux
version of their software to do so. I believe a version of the VCL that
runs on Linux would be technically possible, and would certainly have
made it a lot easier to port existing VCL-based applications to Linux
(and after that, maintaining the cross-platform nature of the
application).
Of course the problem then would be 3rd-party VCL components where the
source was not available - they would not be usable without a Win32 API
compatibility layer such as wine / winelib (which has not been ready to
the degree that it would have needed to be until relatively recently,
however had the project been sponsored in a major way by Borland then
who knows how much further ahead they could have been).
Then, having developed Kylix, which in itself was a good product,
Borland did not continue developing it to keep up with the changes to
the Linux platform. Linux has a very fast pace of development and after
a while, applications built in Kylix simply did not look and feel as
nice as ones built natively (I am mostly referring to those using Qt /
KDE libraries). Of course by this stage I imagine Borland had
unofficially abandoned Kylix development anyway.
I concede perhaps that Borland may have been too far ahead of the market
and that perhaps the world was not ready for desktop Linux at the time
Kylix was released, but I believe we are now at the stage were Linux on
the desktop is a viable alternative in many situations, and Delphi
developers still don't yet really have an easy way to port their
applications to Linux.
Cheers,
Paul
---------------------------------------------------------
Paul Eggleton Ph: +64-9-4154790
Software Developer Fax: +64-9-4154791
CJN Technologies Ltd. DDI: +64-9-4154795
http://www.cjntech.co.nz Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------
[Disclaimer: any opinions expressed in this message are my own and not
those of my employer]
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Neven MacEwan (B.E. E&E)
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