Delphi community edition

Sometimes there are weeks without blogging, sometimes once a day for several days.

By chance, I happened to see a reference to 'Delphi Community Edition': it seems that Embarcadero (the company that now owns Delphi) has decided to make the current version (10.2) free to freelance developers, startups, students and non-profits. I didn't notice this yesterday, but the license is limited to one year. What happens after that? This announcement was made on July 18, so I was lucky to find this early on. An eight week course on Delphi CE will be starting on Monday, so again, the timing was in my favour.

The big advantages for me of having this new version of Delphi are creating unicode programs in Hebrew and being able to program on my laptop. I imagine that I will get used to the new version by converting one of my 'exam programs' to Delphi 10. At some stage I will have to evaluate the database components: can I stay with Firebird or do I have to move to another database manager?

The most worrying aspect is that the license is for one year. What happens in September 2019? Will I be able to renew the license? If not, then there is no point in developing any programs now because I won't be able to maintain them in the future.

I confess that I had problems creating a user or logging back on to the Embarcadero site; it seems that at one stage my user name was being stored with a space at the end. It took me quite some time to discover this, but now things seemed to have improved. I have asked about the one year license.

I do have a specific task to program which will work well in this version of Delphi: writing a command line program which receives as input an Excel file (xlsx) and outputs a tab delimited text file. I need this for Priority: there is a program which does this and is distributed with version 18.2, but I can't get it to work. Having my own tool will help enormously.