I taught myself to write programs on a copy of Delphi 7 I got from a computing magazine CD (or maybe DVD... a long time ago, when Borland owned Delphi...) back in the day. It was great even for an absolute newbie with limited access to developer documentation or someone to properly teach me how to code in Object Pascal properly. I remember extensively searching for VCL packages too.

I'd definitely use Delphi again, and encourage it to be used, if Embarcadero were actually flexible on their licensing.

It's a damn shame that Embarcadero places so many restrictions[1] on Delphi Community Edition (CE) for even open-source contributions by anyone bigger than a small niche development shop.

If Embarcadero wanted to muscle back into the collective consciousness of software developers, allowing enterprise entities to use Delphi CE on open-source projects is a no-brainer, considering even Microsoft allows this with Visual Studio Community Edition[2], albeit with some other restrictions. Microsoft's enterprise limits on Visual Studio Community (250 PCs or not more than U.S. $1,000,000 or equivalent revenue) are so much more reasonable than Embarcadero's laughable $5,000 (thousand; not a typo) revenue limit.

An explosion of open-source Delphi projects might just revive it, if the CE licensing agreement wasn't so absurdly restrictive.

[1] https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/faq#tab-... [2] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/license-terms/vs2022-ga-c...