Its real, certainly not going in to client details though that would be pretty unprofessional.

Currently my main income is derived from a suite of software I wrote for a small winery who subsequently grew to be a very big winery. They got big enough to hire an IT team and a Manager and a consultant who basically are telling me that Delphi is ancient and my whole system is a risk to the business despite having 100% up-time for the last 10 years (Basically if their server was up the system was up). Nothing I am able to do is going to convince them otherwise and it is on the cards to replace it.

Again I will gracefully back down and support the system until it is changed so should get another 2-4 years out of it based on previous experience *

I was an IT Manager for a long time and I do understand peoples worries but I also understand that if something is working, is documented, has an open source and data structure, can be supported and doesn't have a forced end of life there is sometimes a bigger risk to making a change. Behind a lot of software is generally one guy or gal, I don't try and hide that fact and sometimes pay the price but and I know several other packages that have just one guy as the linchpin but there will be no pressure on them as they hide it behind a company.

I also have C and SQL skills which people don't find so offensive :-)

* The expenses system I wrote in the UK had the same decision made on it in 2004 to replace it with the new mega SAP R/3 ERP they were moving to and it was still being used up until 2016. A Time Management System I wrote in 2008 is still being used despite the client telling me it would be phased out in 2013 as part of a new CRM system.

Nobody writes Delphi so it would be difficult for the client to maintain their software if their relationship with the original author ever ended.

Yup, I don't blame the client at all for rejecting a Delphi contractor.

Where I live it would be easier to just start the project from scratch than to try to find someone proficient in Delphi to maintain it

Just find any decent programmer and have them learn Delphi as needed?

I mean, a lot of people program in a language they aren't familiar with because it has the best ecosystem for a given job or because the open source project they are modifying is written in that language.

That's an option, but I can't imagine many folks would want to learn Delphi and continue to invest their time into it unless the money is worth it.

"Just find any decent programmer and have them learn Delphi as needed?"

That is big money.

I just read the marketing material for Delphi and I beg to differ. I thought Delphi was a curiosity last heard of in 1993. How wrong I was.

According to the tick boxes you can rapidly develop for any platform and deploy everything without waiting around. I have no idea why anyone would want to develop in anything else. If the client could not find a developer to take on the project they could be up and running pushing all the features by teatime.

On top of it, there's a Delphi-compatible, FOSS IDE and compiler to use instead:

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

It has an active community. I don't know how big it is, though.