Oh, I can answer that one: By purposefully ruining - and continuing to ruin - a great community of developers around Delphi.

I apologize in advance for what will be a salty (but truthful, I hope) statement, and it was invited, so I would like to give it in the hope that it might be heard by someone who can do something about it.

You, Idera, just can't get it into your heads that the success of a programming language is measured in how many people are using it, learning it, messing around with it. Not how many Enterprise customers you have that you have locked into buying upgrades.

There are statements out there (even from veteran Delphi people I really respect) who seriously argue that "we can't put out a free version of Delphi because it will be abused". I can barely respond to that in friendly words, I'll only say that's total madness. Even purveyors of software orders of magnitude more expensive than Delphi (architecture and 3D modelling come to mind, even some movie and music producers) have understood that if you make it available at no charge to students and young people, to groups who just don't have the money, they will be the ones that will buy it at full price as soon as they have the chance.

It happened to me. I think I can admit it here, as many have: My first steps into programming where with a copy of Delphi on an unmarked CD decades ago. It was a rush, a high like I've never experienced again. Truly my first love. And when I later got some job responsibility, I actually got a purchase order through for a Delphi Architect edition (the most expensive SKU). But these times are long gone and are unlikely to repeat because today's students don't have the Delphi community anymore that I had to teach me.

But Delphi's current (and previous) owners just don't get that. To them, Delphi seems to be something "elite", something only people paying thousands of bucks should get access to. Taking free money from a few legacy firms, who's going to say not to that?

No, you will not extract a couple thousand bucks from a small student programmer. No, you will not get programmers in poorer countries to buy your software at these prices. You will especially not stop bigger organizations or people who truly want to abuse it. If they need it, they will pirate it, just like they do with Adobe, Microsoft etc. Don't think you're better and cleverer than those guys. The joke is probably (I suspect) that pirated versions are still easier to install than getting the dated 12-months community edition of Delphi with all its nagging.

One could probably find an argument where it would be fair to pay good money for new Delphi versions every now and then. But you don't put nearly enough effort in improving the IDE (the object inspector is still horrible to use if you're doing UI-heavy work - there is e.g. still no "favorites" tab), you still don't support PNG and JPG across the board or make it possible to play an MP4 file in the mediaplayer component. No transparent TEdit, TMemo, a lot of new component implementations are half-hearted at best. The list of little buggy, annoying things that are unchanged for 20 years is endless. You just don't care.

The only one you hurt with this, Idera, is yourself and the community (and by that, again, yourself). The Delphi community was one of the most vibrant and multi-faceted in the world. Thousands of components for anything you could possibly imagine. Great forums and message boards that put StackExchange to shame. All that was literally choked off because Embarcadero wanted to make an extra buck. It was not because of Python or Java. Those just filled a void you purposefully created.

And now Delphi 10.4 has been out for almost 10 months and you still haven't been able to publish a free community edition for it, still insisting on rubbing it in everybody's face that you consider community edition users to be barely legal freeloaders who can do just well with an old and buggy edition (which e.g. still doesn't support the new Chromium Edge browser component afaik).

So, shame on you Idera/Embarcadero. And, frankly, shame on the old Delphi guys supporting this behavior and not taking a stand for a great language and a great community and for not forcing Idera to do things differently. You guys still have a voice, still have name recognition in the community, use it to talk sense and reason, effect change!

I for one still think, like several others here, that Delphi even today remains unsurpassed in several aspects (especially in the rapid development of UI and Windows-heavy apps). But that's thanks to a lack of great alternatives, not thanks to Idera's innovation, that's for sure. So don't pat yourself on the back.

All is not lost but we'd have to see a major offensive in terms of openness from Delphi's current owners. It sure would be awesome to make Delphi just half as great as it once was. But why not start small: Put the Community Edition on the same release cycle as the paid versions. Update the UI a bit with some irresistible great features. Then fix bugs and innovate, go into schools and invest, invest, invest in community. It might just pay off...