To grow, Borland to cut off its roots (ZDNet) [LWN.net]

ZDNet looks at Borland's change of direction, noting that free software has closed off its old business model. "Today, Borland's traditional business is being undercut by open-source. In the past two years, the rise of freely available open-source IDEs, notably the Eclipse software, has cut the legs out from beneath the stand-alone tools market, said analysts."

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Re: To grow, Borland to cut off its roots (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 9, 2006 4:06 UTC (Thu) by X-Nc (guest, #1661) [Link]

It's sad to see this happen but it was inevitable, really. I still have very fond memories of TurboC and the early BorlandC++ running on my DOS 4 PC.

To grow, Borland to cut off its roots (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 9, 2006 5:28 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

We old-timers remember that, when Borland was starting out, it made a splash by greatly undercutting the competition, often selling tools like compilers for a tenth what the competition was charging, and using simpler license terms ("like a book", as they called it: you could sell your copy to someone else if you didn't keep a copy).

They got their start by being cheaper and more flexible, but not necessarily the quality leader. And that's what has beat them.

To grow, Borland to cut off its roots (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 9, 2006 10:26 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Turbo Pascal was certainly the quality leader back in MS-DOS days (I used it when it was about version 5). Actually it was the only serious option for Pascal, and it greatly popularised Pascal for a while because it was so much nicer than existing tools for other languages. As I remember, Borland's C and Basic compilers were far superior to Microsoft's offerings too. Much smaller executable, faster code, faster compilation, excellent IDE.

But, in a sense, they were the quality leader, too...

Posted Feb 9, 2006 10:38 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

I learned my Pascal on TP2 and TP3 (CP/M 80). It was years ahead of the
BASIC interpreters that we had at the time (we could do better, bigger
programs with it) and it was the first IDE that I know of -- the
edit/compile/debug cycles all in one place, without a lot of frills (yea,
I used a Modula-3 compiler at the time -- don't recall which now -- that
had an IDE too, and a syntax-completing editor, etc: but it generated far
worse code than TP.

To grow, Borland to cut off its roots (ZDNet)

Posted Feb 10, 2006 0:56 UTC (Fri) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

I remember maybe 11-12 years ago I first learned C from one of those "Learn C in 20 Lessons" type books, and it included a version of Turbo C++ for DOS. There was a primitive form of DRM included though; any binaries created by the compiler would only run normally within the included IDE. If you tried to run them from a DOS prompt they would bomb out with "This program must be run within the Turbo C++ IDE".

I'm glad that free software eliminates that kind of thing from being viable anymore.