FYI, open source: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

> Lazarus is a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Free Pascal. It includes LCL which is more or less compatible with Delphi's VCL. Free Pascal is a GPL'ed compiler that runs on Linux, Win32, OS/2, 68K and more. Free Pascal is designed to be able to understand and compile Delphi syntax, which is OOP.

+1. Lazarus is also true multiplatform: one can run the IDE itself and compiled apps also on most small ARM boards that can run a Linux distribution.

Example: http://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_on_Raspberry_Pi

I was a huge Delphi fan, jumping from Paradox straight to Delphi. I had been doing flat-file database apps in Turbo Pascal before I found Paradox and so it's like Delphi was made for me.

I used it for a very long time, but it was destroyed by the companies that owned it. A free version should have been always available, they could have taken advantage of all the Pascal hobbyists out there and given them a way to establish careers as business software developers.

I'm not sure whether it's too little, but it's definitely too late. Business apps I'm familiar with that were written in Delphi are either gone or nearing their end of life.

But I still haven't found anything as useful as Delphi for simple database apps. I've been doing .net for nearly 7 years now and it's just nowhere near Delphi for functionality. But desktop apps seem to be old-school, so maybe it doesn't matter anyway.

Not so old school.

I would put mobile native on the same basket.

And outside HN bubble there is still a thriving native UIs for infotainment, healthcare, factory automation, field machine control units,...

I have spent the last 4 years doing native UIs for life science labs.

1 year license, no updates, ≤US$5000 revenue and ≤5 devs in the org (not just on the Delphi license, but total) only?

It's like they looked at VS Community license and said “lets do something like that for Delphi, but narrow the licensing enough that there is no real use case.”

Kylix is what could have made Delphi be the "Java" of the industry, with a good AOT compiler, value types, and all the RAD goodies.

Too many bad management decisions were taken since then.

In a way it seems Embarcadero have their blinders on. But it is better than nothing. I think I would make the Delphi compiler free and charge everybody a pure subscription for the IDE at pricing levels comparable to Jetbrains, but without any kind of fallback to avoid competing with yourself. It would allow them to focus on making an excellent IDE to secure recurring revenue, at their own pace. But they seem to be wired to chase (existing) corporate accounts. Obviously they will be people who will develop tooling around their free compilers, but that helps build a funnel for a high quality IDE and greatly increases chances to become a platform again.

I wish I didn't need to create an Embarcadero account just to download it. I can download VS Community Edition without needing to register.

It does not seem to work anyways. I created an account to download C++ Builder CE but after clicking Download, it sends you again to the registration page. If the goal of this initiative was to collect emails for mailing lists, it is brilliant. If the goal was that people get on board, the current sign up process is very, very ineffective.

Man I always liked Delpi, it felt like what the VB6 interface builder should have been.

"Got error 28 from storage engine"

Not a good sign!

Finally, this is long overdue

It's long overdue but is still crippling for the ecosystem. If you want to learn, that's great but if you want to make a business out of it then there are still too many restrictions for majority of non-Delphi developers. A revenue of $5000 prohibiting use from the Community Edition is crazy low, especially when it isn't even profit. The cheapest version of Delphi 10.2 Tokyo right now is on sale for $1,196, which means that once you hit $5k in revenue you would have to spend 20% of that revenue on licensing your IDE if you want to keep going and remain compliant.

Now, take a look at the Visual Studio Community license terms[0]. They, too, have a revenue restriction but it is $1 million but they also throw in a PC count of at least 250 PCs. Once you hit that threshold you will have to spend $499 on the lowest paid version of Visual Studio in order to keep on making your software.

That said, if one is wanting to learn Delphi then I would recommend Free Pascal with Lazarus instead as it handles cross platform easier than Delphi does and it is free.

Too little, too late, I'm afraid.

The only reason I've started with Delphi back in the day (and loved it) was because everything was pirated in Ukraine circa year 2000, so nobody would even care about licensing/price point.

I used Delphi versions 2-7 many years ago when I was learning to code, some were free versions some were pirated ones. Then I moved to other web languages (PHP, JS, HTML, CSS) and then few years ago I discovered free Lazarus/FPC combo. It's stable and has single huge advantage - it runs flawlessly on Linux/OSX/Windows/FreeBSD and can compile binaries for other OSes and architectures even on ARM(Raspberry Pi). Lately I've found UniDAC database components by devart.com for Delphi/Lazarus and loved them instantly.

I also think Delphi Community version is too little, too late with such a good and cheap alternative.

I'm not affiliated with devart.com.

Lazarus / FPC definitely looks good, I'll check it out! (I still have Delphi 7 installed on one of the machines, so I haven't looking around for alternatives - for what it appears to be 12+ years now).

One thing I liked was how quickly one could bang out a simple GUI application. Sometimes, that's all I need.

They have been doing this for at least a year or more. The license is incredibly restrictive. Lazarus IDE is pretty much equal now, minus the extra "mobile" bells and whistles that Delphi has.