Pitching the OCL to Borland Management

Someone whom I respect very much suggested that one deterrent people may have to signing our Open Community Letter (OCL) is its length. So, I took a few minutes to boil down the points of the letter so that those who are interested in Borland continuing the BCB product line, but are hesitant to provide a signature to something that they feel requires them to read in detail, will now have zero excuses as to what this letter is about. Incidently I found this as a good exercise resulting in something that could be used for pitching the argument to Borland Management (thus the title for this post).


Key points of letter

Arguments

• Borland must continue development, maintenance and updates of its Rapid Application Development (RAD) focused C++Builder product line including VCL support.
• Time is of the essence. Decisions are being made. Borland must no longer delay.

Chief Problem

• Borland’s lack of Communication and Commitment over the course of the past two years regarding C++Builder (e.g. promissed open letters that failed to materialize, lack of updates to BCB 6, CBX misdirection)
• C++Builder is a Mission Critical application for developers and the customers whom developers support.
• Developers, and sponsors are in limbo / many are upset

Impact of Problem

• alternative tools, languages and vendors products are receiving greater consideration for future product development.
• “investment” in C++Builder built is being seen as a potential “loss”
• Software teams using Borland’s C++Builder product line will require to be retrained and re-skilled for other development environments and languages.
• Mission critical “long lived assets” are now in jeopardy of receiving support for maintenance / improvements
• Users/developers of other products such as Delphi (e.g. VCL vendors) are affected

Key Considerations

• The potential impact to customers, some of whom are major entities, who use and rely upon C++Builder built software,
• third party Delphi component and library vendors who have a stronger financial interest in producing VCL controls, components and tools if they can be leveraged by BCB users.
• customers who demand high performance and reliable applications in which only a standard-based language such as C++ can be uniformly considered.
• Customers, sponsors and users who rely on C++Builder based applications to be maintained, but this would be contingent upon if developers can rely on C++Builder to be maintained (patched, supported, and improved upon).
• Microsoft renewed intent for C++ as the principal language for exploiting CLR for .NET., which creates greater compelling reason for C++ Builder to persist and evolve to support .NET (leveraging the Delphi for .NET effort)
• BCB as a key part of the Borland Developer Studio (BDS) environment.
• The statements by Dale Fuller (Borland CEO), in which he said “[Borland] will never abandon the developers.” and “Borland’s past is really our future.”

Likely Result of BCB Abandonment

• If Borland sidelines a popular and key product, a likely consequence is that developers* and sponsors* will end up sidelining Borland. (*This is not exclusive of just C++Builder users)

Potential Result of BCB Recommitment

• If responsive to the community letter and those that signed it, Borland is seen as attentive and responsive to needs of community.
• C++Builder can restablish itself as the mission critical application development environment of our industry for both Win32 and .NET.