Borland

I learnt that Borland has decided to retain control of their tools division, choosing to spin it off into a separate wholly owned (and controllable) subsidiary.

Larry O'Brien is wondering why there has been very little comment on this in the great blogosphere.

I left one answer (I really need to watch my 2's), and as part of that answer I said "Borland's management don't appear to have a clear answer to a basic question: how do you compete with Microsoft on one side, and free software on the other?" 

I gave Borland's management a solution to this minor problem years ago. On one of the Delphi mailing lists I suggested that they should lower the cost of entry to $0 by giving away their products for free.

The catch was that the free products should be pre-configured to work with a website owned and run by Borland. A web site that offered Source Forge style cross platform software development support. Yes, the whole ALM thing, as a service across the Internet.

My idea was that if you didn't want to pay for this, your project was automatically open source and free. If you did pay you could choose your level of ALM support. For the free service Borland could make up revenue by embedding adverts and other assorted offers, pretty much as SourceForge and Google have started to do in the years since my suggestion.

All these years on, and I still think that my idea is a good one!

9:51:44 PM