They used to give it away. I learnt to program from a free magazine cover-disk Delphi, and its excellent help system.

We give it away now too :) There is a Community edition, where the license terms are basically that you should buy it only if you make significant revenue. Students, hobbyists, early stage startups etc - free.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

Too bad you don't actually let us reinstall the software we already paid for.

Not sure what you mean there, sorry.

It is quite simple. I mean that if you install the software N times; perhaps because you often switch and rebuild machines; and you do not have a current subscription; Dennis in tech support will not reset your license registration limit; and you will never be able to install the software again.

If that happened, it is an error. I believe the flow these days is to go through Sales, but you do not have to buy or have a current subscription to install.

I'll repeat that: You can install a hundred times if you need. You do not have to buy or have a current subscription to install.

The license server counts installations and flags for verification after a certain number because it's quite common for people to install far more times (ie, for more people) than they actually bought. All that is required after you install a one-person license enough times to trigger the server asking questions is to contact us and let us know you really are using it legally. Then you're good to go.

I'm not sure that $5000 would count as significant revenue (I'd prefer an extra zero on that) but I suppose it's reasonable that if you earn enough from Delphi to pay for it, you should.

I can't find the new pricing on the website (everything is free trial / request a quote) but I remember the last time I saw pricing it was so much that I opted to kill the one Delphi-made product I had rather than upgrade. I'm using Xojo instead for my cross-platform RAD development now.

From reading the product-editions page, am I misunderstanding things or is the community version unable to even access a database?

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/product-editions

I can't see students not needing DB access let alone 'early stage startups', without TDataSet et al, it would be effectively useless/worthless. (we're STILL using D5 where I work)

No - you can do everything in Community you can in Pro, the main paid edition. You can certainly use databases. We generally have a higher SKU for remote databases.

sorry but remote database = postgres, mysql (or any relational db server)

that is ridiculous in 2020

and you only get that with the "enterprise edition"

"professional" only gets you embeded and localhost DB ?!?

I still have my old separate Firedac licence for an old project i support, but anybody new coming to this mess will just have a good lough and move on.

> sorry but remote database = postgres, mysql (or any relational db server)

You can use open source libraries like Zeoslib (https://zeoslib.sourceforge.io/) or mORMot (https://synopse.info/fossil/wiki?name=SQLite3+Framework).

No source code, thus bad debug experience. 32 bit only.

I suppose it is not easy for you (as a tool supplier).

Delphi's Community edition comes with source code and you can debug into the inbuilt libraries. And with Community you can build 32 and 64 bit apps for Windows, iOS, Android, and macOS.

They figured it out but only recently, now the race is over.