Why a closed edition?
For 12 years TurboCASH has run as a pure open source project. We were one of the first Windows projects to adopt open source. In this time downloads have exceeded 2 Million and our registered users are over 100 000. Some of our users have grown into very large businesses.
However after 12 years open source has moved on. While this has happened proprietary companies have not been idle. We have continued to develop in Embarcaderos Delphi. Over the last 10 years rather than moving towards open source, Embarcadero and its partners have entrenched themselves as proprietary vendors. The have been developing some really good code!
To a large portion of our users, free is not as important as excellent.
We could take an ideological view and simply ignore the proprietary developments, but it gets harder over the years. Instead we have taken a pragmatic approach and embraced some of their technologies. The latest TurboCASH5 does just that and I am sure you will see the immediate benefits to the TurboCASH user. Unfortunately these developments don't come for free and we are not licenced to release these components as open source. To fund this route we have launched TurboCASH Business Class for the princely sum of $60 per year. This will give us the funding required to continue with the proprietary technologies and continue to give you the best of both worlds. There are many paid services to come that would be foolish to ignore.
Does this mean that we will stop open source development? No not at all. Users are free to continue with the open source releases that we have. These can still be downloaded free. If open source is ideologically important to you, it is also important to us, we will continue with open source, but not on Delphi.
So where to with our future open source development?
It is is time for a radical rethink. Over the last 30 years TurboCASH has had 5 major technology backbones and changes. Events of the last 5 years notably the explosion of the cloud have made Javascript technologies particularly enticing. Microservices are a lot more suited to open source development. Currently entry into TurboCASH requires an expensive licencing and a massive compile of 1Million lines of code.
This year will see us begin an open source development around Jacva script that will leverage on our legacy assets and take us forward into the elastic opportunities offered by cloud computing.
We will announce details of this project and how you can participate shortly.
If you are interested in close source Delphi Development Mail Me
If you are interested in open source Javascript Development Mail Me
