Why on earth does Andreas Hausladen have to pay for a subscription?

Why on earth does Andreas Hausladen have to pay for a subscription?
Embarcadero should give him whatever he wants - plus the free subscription.
IDEFixPack is quite essential for any Delphi release. And I still wonder why this still isn't part of the official release process.
https://twitter.com/AndyHTech/status/685138154114908160

Comments

  1. Why they pirated InstallAware instead of extending tit-pro-tat cooperation? If you can charge someone, why not to try? Same lawyers logic like behind MPAA/RIAA lawsuits.

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  2. He should do it years ago, then he could still make updates to XE2 :)

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  3. I'm surprised he isn't a MVP - but to become one you have to be nominated, and maybe everyone already thought he was one?

    However, the followup tweets indicate it's a problem with time, not money, ie as I read it, either whether he has the time to continue making the fix pack, or the fact that he's only spent 80 hours in newer versions than XE2, so whether it's worthwhile. (Not sure of the interpretation there.)

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  4. Disagree with giving out free subscriptions because you would have to do it for quite a few others that have provided free tools dealing with the IDE.

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  5. Wasn't there accounts that MVPs were monitored about taking proper public stances on all controversies regarding EMBT and RS ?

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  6. He should support FPC/Lazarus. It is free. IMO Andreas wasting time and potential on Delphi.

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  7. Absolutely agree! His contributions to Delphi are immense!

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  8. If Andy decided not to continue it would be a big loss - but if it is a free-time thing, it's entirely understandable.

    Even so, I do think Emba should extend the offer of a free subscription to him - it might persuade him to continue with his tools if there was no cost of entry for him at all.

    FWIW, I would have willingly paid something for speed up and fix pack over the years.

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  9. Arioch The MVPs have to sign an actual contract promising not to "disparage" either the product or Embarcadero. There are a lot of prominent people in the Delphi community who aren't interested in signing that agreement.

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  10. Rob Uttley It wouldn't be a free time thing if he was offered financial compensation for his services, which should have been done years ago. His code should also be part of the official IDE. You shouldn't need to download a 3rd party "fix pack" for your $1400 IDE.

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  11. Joseph Mitzen (MVP not disparaging) - ah, I can see that being an issue.

    (Financial compensation) - no argument there from me. At times, it's felt like Andy's input has kept some of the older releases viable, which given the frequency of modern releases, is a valuable service to be offering the community.

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  12. Richard Baroniunas why not do it? Delphi ecosystem is in death spiral. If keeping it going would require not risky money investments but merely free activation string - why not???

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  13. Rob Uttley​​ ...like Andy's input has kept some of the older releases viable, which given the frequency of modern releases...

    ...was nothing but an attack against EMBT heroic salesforce!

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  14. Arioch The Not sure where you came up with the death spiral because that has been mentioned since 2005 and hasn't happen yet. Why would Idera drop tons of money for a product that is dead ? They could have easily just purchased the database products but instead purchased the entire company.

    The reason I do not think he should get a free subscription is that there are a lot of developers that provide free software for enhancing the IDE as well as just loving to program, should they be compensated ?

    If anyone wishes they can donate money to Andreas to pay for his subscription. Maybe Nick Hodges can provide insight as to why the package was never incorporated into the product line.

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  15. I don't know why in the hell Andy is not working for Embarcadero in the first place! My only conclusion is: He does not want to, because he has a more interesting job! There is no other possible explanation.

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  16. Richard Baroniunas The integration of the fixes and improvements from IDE Fix Pack does cost money as well and the changes needs to be accepted by the engineers. The latter is a much bigger problem that one might believe. Almost all of our contacts left EMBT years ago and so "sneaking" changes into the product is largely impossible. If the changes are integrated into the product they have to work 100 percent. Now if a patch does not work for you, you can uninstall IDE Fix Pack or disable the offending patch.

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  17. Alexandre Machado Employees cannot do what they want.

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  18. Alexandre Machado I guess he is earning more here ... http://www.wilken.de/ ... and they never asked him ... and he does not want to travel that much ... and he might have a notion that the other compiler guys at EMB would give him a hard time ( but what the heck do I know ) - Andreas Hausladen could answer ... if he wants to. We can only speculate.

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  19. Uwe Schuster I'm not saying that he would be able to do whatever he wants. There is no doubt in my mind that Andy is more talented than most IDE guys that worked in the Galileo IDE. He was able to fix TONS of critical bugs without even looking at the source code. This should be enough to get him invited. I do know guys from other communities hired by Google, Sun, Oracle because they clearly demonstrated an uncommon talent in some specific area. Borcadero seems the only one that does not hire employees from the developer community (exception for Nick and Marco Cantú).

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  20. Yes Roland Kossow , as I said, he does not want to. I prefer to think that he was invited but declined the invitation, if you know what I mean.... ;-)

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  21. Alexandre Machado Yes - I understand what you mean :-)

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  22. Uwe Schuster "If the changes are integrated into the product they have to work 100 percent."

    If that were a hard and fast rule, Castalia wouldn't be in the product nor would generics for starters. Both shipped terribly broken.

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  23. Alexandre Machado EMBT is not such a company, I would not want to work for EMBT and the biggest difference between Andy and me might be that he is still releasing his stuff. What counts for EMBT is sales, less costs and not talent.

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  24. Richard Baroniunas I don't want to go through this discussion again, so I'll just do the highlights:

    "The Not sure where you came up with the death spiral because that has been mentioned since 2005 and hasn't happen yet."

    It has happened; you're in it. 2005, for instance, was the last year a commercial publisher chose to publish a Delphi book. 

     "Why would Idera drop tons of money for a product that is dead?"

    They purchased it for its database products, which align with their own business.

    " They could have easily just purchased the database products but instead purchased the entire company."

    How do you have any idea whether they could have just purchased a piece of the company? That certainly wouldn't have been just as easy. The company has one HR department, one accounting department, one marketing department, etc. They weren't purchasing the product rights; they were purchasing the whole company. Embarcadero hasn't simply been folded into Idera. How would the company have been split up in that case and why would EMBT's owners have wanted to agree to that type of purchase? 

    "The reason I do not think he should get a free subscription is that there are a lot of developers that provide free software for enhancing the IDE as well as just loving to program, should they be compensated ? "

    Yes, why not? JetBrains give a free license to open source contributors. I guess the answer would be no if you follow Rudy's argument, who said that someone (he can't remember who) explained to him (but he can't remember how) that issuing product keys costs the company money. :-) 

    And if they're not developing for you, they're going to develop for someone else that does appreciate and take care of them. 

    "Maybe +Nick Hodges can provide insight as to why the package was never incorporated into the product line."

    I'm sure we can all think of one reason, and its initials would be NIH.

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  25. Joseph Mitzen Andy himself said something like that. It is a question of attitude and that is different at EMBT. I am sure that someone has cristal clear told EMBT that Castalia using hacks to integrate into the IDE must not be shipped with XE8 and has to be really integrated with private or public APIs. I guess that guy has been kicked out of the inner circle, because no one wants to here that it must not be shipped.

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  26. Based on some of the awful code that's been seen coming out of EMBT for years, I'm sure part of the problem of integrating Andy's code into the product is that very few people at EMBT have the technical skill to understand and maintain it without him.

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  27. Uwe Schuster
    "EMBT is not such a company, I would not want to work for EMBT" People choose jobs because of many things. I've heard people leaving Microsoft because they didn't like Redmond weather... people leaving US to live in Australia because they want to surf everyday. Who knows? Besides that, I don't know Andy and of course he is not obligated to work for Embarcadero. But Embarcadero should feel obligated to invite him, that's the whole point of my original post.

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  28. Let me give you another example why I think he should have a free Delphi, and probably Andreas would remember that: Long time ago, in CodeGear forums, I was complaining about a critical performance issue in ClientDataSet when dealing with a large number of records (a real show stopper issue). Nick was the Delphi product manager then and was also participating in that discussion. I think Andreas has read that thread and a few hours later came back with Midas Speed Fix (http://andy.jgknet.de/blog/bugfix-units/midas-speed-fix-12/).
    Yes, he found the problem and provided a fix in just a few hours, without the source code. Delphi team probably got trapped inside the bureaucracy - or just didn't care enough - to fix it. Later, his fix was incorporated into Midas code.

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  29. Alexandre Machado Seems like he needs to be more than a developer at EMBT; he should be in charge of software development and possibly building and training a new tech support staff. That's the level of competence where you say "name your price".

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  30. If he is feeling like he really wants to update the IdeFIXPack and other stuff, we should donate him Subscription if Iderabadero does not be smart enough to do that.

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  31. +Joseph Mitzen "training a new tech support staff" ? Really? I know very few things more boring than that. But, anyways, maybe someone likes it... However, some people just like to write code, you know? They don't want to travel to the other side of the world for business every week, they don't want boring meetings taking 1/2 your day, every day.... I know lots of people that just like to write code! Anyway, enough speculation for today! Have a great weekend!

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  32. Why should EMBA pay him money? He is working for free! That's capitalism! --Sad story!

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  33. Aren't there free licences for open source projects? This is what JetBrains does for example. Might by a future possibility to keep the Delphi open source community up to date with the releases

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  34. The problem is time, not money >>>
     Andreas Hausladen ‏@AndyHTech 15 hil y a 15 heures 
    @punctuation Last year I've spend only ~80 hours in whole working with any Delphi XE2+. It's not the money that's the problem, it's the time

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  35. Richard Baroniunas not sure why you think they could purchase "database products only"

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  36. Markus Müller Yes, JetBrains offers free IDEs to open source leads and core contributors. The irony is that under the terms and conditions Andreas could get a free JetBrains IDE today but not an Embarcadero one!

    I thought in a debate about how EMBT supports open source that Nick Hodges told me that EMBT has given away free product to open source developers before. I'm not aware of any policy in regards to that, however.

    Per my other debate today with Chris Rolliston about what a VP Of Developer Relations should be doing (and it's not marketing), David Intersimone should have been right on this issue remedying it before it drew any attention. Developer Relations should be the ears, not the mouth, of the organization and concerned with keeping customers/developers happy. This is a textbook squeaky wheel that needed greasing. 

    And speaking of JetBrains, I was reading the comments on a blog post about their new database IDE release. One individual gave detailed feedback and the employee (don't know rank) who replied wrote that they checked and since this person had contributed so much good feedback during the testing period for the new IDE and since he said he liked the product they were e-mailing him a license key for the full version for free. So with JetBrains, sometimes management just gives free product away to helpful people to keep them happy and generate goodwill. Why do we have to jump up and down to try to get an incredibly valuable community member any type of compensation? :-(

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  37. Alexandre Machado​ I remember some unsourced hints that AH actually could had look over the sources. But he could not make his changes in so had to resort to in-memory patches like we all can do with RTL (I did when XE2 broken office com interfaces in last update before launching XE3).

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  38. Uwe Schuster​ "working 100%" and EMBT ? Pick one. When they appropriated FLOSS libs of Henri Gourvest, making him pull the plug, was that very independent 100% proof be made? When they took vgScene so 100% that FMX1 was next to thrown under bus?

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  39. Paul TOTH The actual problem is: After many years it's still necessary to get the IDE fixed by a 3rd party - and this for each new release. And I'm not aware of any development scenario where the IDEFixPack shouldn't be installed. I really appreciate Andreas' work, but I would prefer we wouldn't have to rely on his work and have all those fixes out of the box.

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  40. Fred Ahrens
    Every year, new developers (new hired, not well Delphi trained) produce new bugs.

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  41. Arioch The Idera is a database software solutions company.

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  42. I'll weigh in here because I see a certain amount of FUD flying around.

    But first, a hearty "Welcome Back" to our good friend Joseph Mitzen! We've missed you! If you really want to bust a nut, go over to non-tech and read the thread about #Code2015.

    Okay, here's two things, keeping in mind my need for discretion about EMBT and my respect for Andreas, who seems to be a private person.

    1. With regard to MVP/Tech Partner/Integrating things into the IDE/working for EMBT/getting paid/getting free stuff, it all is as Andreas wishes it to be.

    2. Andreas has (or had, I have been gone for five years) access to Delphi source code.

    That's all I have.

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  43. Lots of FUD. Joseph Mitzen "They purchased it for its database products, which align with their own business." No. They didn't (at least not only that.) Delphi and C++Builder are valuable to them. I'm pretty certain I've already mentioned that in this forum.

    I don't like the culture in Delphi forums of fear, moaning, sky-is-falling - constantly. I happen to feel very positive about Delphi and CB right now, largely because instead of expressing fear on the forums I went and asked. And then I reported back: https://plus.google.com/107032218922460039706/posts/J7xpboXd6fz

    One reason I hang out here instead of non-tech is because people are more rational here, largely. I don't mind participating in huge arguments about language features or direction - those are great, in fact, positive and educational - but I do regret seeing unfounded doom-and-gloom.

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  44. Arioch The As I did already explain to Joseph - that it has to work is what Andy said. Almost every new version of Delphi requires me to add more patches.

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  45. Nick Hodges I clearly disagree with you on the "Integrating things into the IDE" part of 1st. That worked very well when you were still there, but at the time when Mark Edington left, Andy and I lost one of the last remaining and very valuable contacts. Getting things integrated is much much harder now. I do not know how hard Andy tried in the recent past to get things integrated, because I did not bother him on that topic in the past few years. I have information regarding the integration of one of the most "visible" things - Compiler SpeedPack - but that is nothing to share. It is about why they did not want to integrate it at the time Andy told me.

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  46. Uwe Schuster Okay, you'd know better than I.

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  47. Uwe Schuster so i am staying with xe2. At least i know the bugs that affect my work.

    And the strings-related code inflation shocked me too.

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  48. Richard Baroniunas 1. Delphi itself started as database solution - a solution to make rich GUI to databases. 2. That Idera might want something does not mean it can get something. I maybe may want someone to give EMBT to me for birthday, but who cares wha i want? So with Idera/EMBT merger, whatever Idera might wish does not make it really possible.

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  49. Nick Hodges
    "But first, a hearty "Welcome Back" to our good friend +Joseph Mitzen! We've missed you! If you really want to bust a nut, go over to non-tech and read the thread about #Code2015."

    https://youtu.be/4F4qzPbcFiA

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  50. Arioch The Turbo Pascal gave birth to Delphi and Delphi was not a database solution in the beginning that came later. It was a RAD windows development tool to cut the development time down from using the Windows SDK which was a pain in the neck.

    When SQLinks came out much later it was an add-on to interface into various databases while the primary database interface for the Delphi package was strictly Paradox/BDE.

    Idera is a database solutions company, I did research for a company a couple of years ago dealing with their SQL products and chose Powerstudio instead which gave a lot more for a better bang.

    All in all no one really knows why Idera purchased EMB and to do any assumption would be a guess at best unless you personally knew the CEO.

    I am hoping that Idera will put all of the EMB products upfront and gain market share but at the moment without a college / educational / hobbyist price package they will lose out while Visual Studio Community is free. If you lose the upcoming programmer the share will diminish.

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  51. Richard Baroniunas you imply that database is only SQLinks and nothing else. And i see no point in mentioning TP/BP/BPW in the given context.

    Delphi 1 by your words came with
    1. BDE/DBF database
    2. BDE/Pdox database
    3. BDE/LocalSQL access to DBF and Pdox databases
    4. BDE/ODBC access to multiple data sources(including SQL servers).
    5. BDE/SQLinks framework, not yet ready for release, but already in final stages of development.
    6. TDataset-related framework (Data access components), ready to be extended for access to other sources than BDE by anyone.
    7. DB-aware controls, ready out of the box and also ready to be extended by 3rd party
    8. Reports Smith to consume that data from the database sources.

    Yes, you could develop non-db apps with Delphi too. And you could develop non-db apps with Visual Clipper as well, and with dBase too...

    So none of those tools served ONLY to make GUI to databases, but all of them had it as a very important selling point.

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  52. The very appearance of QuickReports, Ace Reporter, Rave Reports, Grid Reports, Fast Reports, etc, their very appearance shows how much Delphi provided as databases access and GUI maker

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  53. Arioch The I did not imply SQLinks and nothing else. I used the BDE strictly for Paradox. The cost involved with getting anything close to native drivers for SQL was non-existing.

    SQLinks was an expensive add-on by Borland.

    Only Report Smith was available and that was weak. The report tool of the day was Crystal Reports and that was expensive.

    So let's end this conversation and keep your opinions to yourself.

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