Developers are not to be Trusted
Tuesday, October 30th, 2012Has anyone noticed that the Developer Edition of Interbase requires a regular restart? I have a little invoicing program that I use on a daily basis, and the back end is IB. I have an unlimited user license of an earlier version of IB, but I chose to install the latest version of the Developer Edition of Interbase so I could evaluate it while working on hcOPF, and my invoicing program which used to be a demo project for hcOPF.
One would think that a Developer Edition of a product would be free of such annoying licensing restrictions because the better experience that a developer has with a product, the more likely they are to recommend it’s use in a production environment. It’s also harder to develop when you’re constantly re-starting your machine. You don’t see such restrictions with MS SQL Server Express, and it has much better market penetration than Interbase.
One would almost think with the proposed EULA change, and the increased copy protection, that the revenue from Delphi is in decline, but in light of the Interbase re-start restriction, perhaps it’s just EMBT doesn’t trust it’s customers, or doesn’t trust developers in general, and makes it’s customers ‘bear the brunt’ of this distrust.
Apple no longer sells DRM music, and there are various other companies who have stopped using or reduced their anti-piracy efforts because it impeded their existing customers, and the public spoke out against such restrictions (remember the Sony Rootkit debacle?). I hope EMBT changes their position on this issue soon. For now, I am going to switch the back end of my invoicing program to SQLExpress. One of the great things about an ORM is it doesn’t lock you into a a specific vendor’s database, and there are plenty of choices out there for databases these days!