So I get excited about seeing an old friend. Then when I read the article, they are opensourcing a version which only works with Delphi versions prior to 2009.
Dude, this is 2020.
Dude, this is 2020.
Their primary modus operandi seems to be: buy tech that's still bringing in money, fire everyone except a small core of people to keep the product barely alive with minor updates, sell expensive long-term licenses to enterprises.
It's no surprise that "the latest official version of Bold is is for Delphi 2006" [1] and that the goal of the opensource version is "is to encourage customers active on the library to share their more recent versions" [2]
[1] https://delphi.fandom.com/wiki/Bold_for_Delphi#The_legal_rig...
[2] https://blogs.embarcadero.com/bold-for-delphi-is-open-source...
That's pretty much what they did with Sencha/ExtJS, too. Not that it wasn't in dire straits even before the acquisition, though.
It looks like enabling that sharing is one of the reasons for open sourcing Bold. So it might be keeping an eye on the GitHub repository.
(I know the guys behind one of the major users, and they should have a lot of goodies to share, hopefully).
Edit: is there any other forum out there? I remember some google group or something but it was mostly dead too.
It was clear that they intended to squeeze the few remaining customers. The forums, even moderated by the company, reflected the bad morale. So they closed the forums. They were in a nntp server with a web gateway.
The last insult, that made me disconnect, was removing database access from the "Professional" license and moving it to the "Enterprise Architect", not sure how it ended, I couldn't keep watching.
This Bold news seem too little too late.
The pro license compiles to Android, IOS, Windows, and OSX. You can connect to SQLite and IBlite. Additionally, you can connect to MySQL or other DBs on localhost for example. Lastly, you can connect to remote databases with third party solutions (though against the spirit of the license).
The enterprise license allows connecting to over 20 different remote databases.
The architect license (the most expensive) has additional features not related to connecting to remote databases.
Come on.
But don't worry, the post is surely out of the front page now, so nobody cares what I say.