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Saturday, June 23, 2007

Bug reporting - a lesson CodeGear can learn from Open Source

My recent usage of the GNU Win32 port of Grep resulted in my discovery of a bug and in custom with my practice, I filed a report. What happened next is a lesson that Borland/CodeGear should learn from the Open Source community.

Not only did they not whinged, throwing up excuses, calling their user and bug reporter not understanding their 'feature', they digested my bug report carefully and promptly acknowledged that was a genuine bug. Even when Borland's bug has been proven beyond doubt, yet they still refused to fix it.

Within a short time, they posted me a message advising me a bug fixed version is available. Full mark for that.

Contrasting that with CodeGear's Delphi bug reports I have filed over the years, I have never received this kind of acknowledgment and quick response. More disturbingly CodeGear's Delphi product is NOT FREE and yet providing far worse support than free stuff. Hence, price does not equate to provision of support, not even meager support.

People considering CodeGear software needs to remember this before spending your money.

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