>>>That tells me that people are betting on Kylix.
>>
>>And Delphi 6 looks pretty sweet too!
>
>
>I really don't think investors are looking at Delphi increasing Bore-land marketshare. Kylix is a new tool for the hot Lynix market. That's what is attracting the attention of investors.

I think you are correct, Craig!

I love Pascal and made many a buck using it. But, Kylix will not be an automatic hit in the Linux market for the same reasons that Pascal never took the WinXX market by storm, or even a breeze. It *may* develop a devoted following, especially of ex Delphi users who have migrated to Linux, (My opinion, flames --> /dev/null) but if the "Faithful" have not generated enough income from Delphi for Borland there is no reason to suggest that after migrating to Linux they will be any more lucrative.

The major languages in Linux are C, C++, Java, Python and Perl. The major C tool is Glade, using GTK+, used in GNOME. The major C++ tool is KDevelop, using the Qt widget set, used in KDE and QtDesigner. Both are GUI RADs are free and GPL, and KDevelop in particular is becoming very powerful and polished. Borland will find it very difficult to compete against those two attributes, even though they imported a lot of powerful widgets (controls) from the WinXX world. After all, Bill Gates used the 'free' IE to defeat Netscape, so he is well aware of it's market potential.

While I wish Kylix success in the Linux world, as a propriatary GUI RAD it brings to the Linux playground the same problems that it and tools like VFP or Visual Basic or Visual C++ have in the WinXX world -- business models that are advantageous to the software house and not necessarily the customer. The power and benefit of the GPL is beginning to become very clear to many corporate CEOs and programmers, even if it isn't appreciated by Craig Mundie or Bill Gates.

Folks who want to produce propriatary code can do so by using Glade, KDevelop, or Java to generate their binaries for sale, unless their project uses GPL code.