Rise of Non-Source Successful Vendors

Not giving out full sources means customers forced to fork out for endless subscriptions, as well as hide... plagiarism.

What do the below Delphi vendors have in common?

• MemoWriterPro (plagarism of WPTools) from UDCorp,

• ReportBuilder from Digital Metaphors,

• IPWorks from /N Software,

• Chilkat Delphi DLLs from Chilkat,

• 2D Barcodes from Han-Soft (similar to BarCodeAPI),

• Delphi QLM from Soraco

• FGX-Native,

• UniGUI from FM-Soft

• AToZed IntraWeb from the infamous TikTok Fugitive

  Guess…?

….

…

They don’t ship full source codes for their product, leading to DFM/DCU mismatch, and many Delphi compilation issues.

The original bunch

In 1990’s, 2000’s - developers had to deal with LIB, OBJ and H files. The CPP files were never redistributed.

Thus, it was a fresh break when TurboPower released BTreeFiler, SysTools with source code.

Not shipping sources drives developers mad, makes it expensive and costly to upgrade their project when Visual Studio, Zortech C++, Symantec C++ or (whatever) compiler comes out.

Questionable Business Practices

While vendors claim quality work, shipping without sources hides licenses compliance issues. Vendors such as UDC selling MemoWriterPro - a plagiarism of WPTools. Another vendor, HotPDF is a plagiarism of QuickPDF library.

Due to EMBT’s business practice of selling C++ Builder separately, there is a split-brain mentality where Delphi developers cannot compile C++ Builder files, C++ Builder developers cannot compile Delphi files.

Hence, there are businesses selling compiled open-source MIT C++ files and offering it to Delphi developers.

Long Lasting Business Plan

Digital Metaphor’s ReportBuilder Enterprise, FMSoft’s UniGUI, FGX-Native, AToZed’s IntraWeb ships with partial sources.

Miss an annual subscription after 30 days? You’ll be forced to renew at increased, or full price. As they do not ship with full sources, hapless customers are forced to pay to get updates.

No source code access = No competition

Seen a competitor to IntraWeb? it was only until AI was developed, (possibly trained via hidden IntraWeb sources) that clues as to how IntraWeb internals worked.

Seen a competitor to ReportBuilder? The venerable FastReport stopped most development years ago. ReportBuilder has unique features FastReport struggle to catch up to.

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