Many of those who're using our new version 1.4 have already noticed an obvious bug: on the Registry Warning dialog, the buttons are misplaced and partly hidden by the checkbox text. But while every software has some bugs, this is one that shouldn't have been necessary. It comes from a bug in our development environment - Borland Delphi - that automatically rearranges graphical items on the user interface every time one works on the project, which basically means about half an hour of work correcting everything each morning before the actual work can begin. And sometimes, like in this case, the errors created by Delphi even sneak into final releases. We will release an updated version as soon as we've fully tested some workarounds.

The long version for people interested in software development:

It's not that Borland would not know of this bug - we regularly report the bugs we found into their Quality Central. But even bugs I reported 18 months ago are still open in their Quality Central, and Borland has released 2 newer versions, and 3 updates for the latest version alone, without fixing most of the problems. And when I was on the phone to Borland, asking for someone who could give me a statement about these bugs, they said it was not enough that I bought the Enterprise edition of their development environment - if I wanted to talk to someone about bugs in the software, I would have to buy premium support first, totally ignoring the implied warranty. Since we wanted to provide our users with an explanation for the bugs that make a new main release necessary more or less directly after releasing 1.4, I asked them for a public statement about some of their bugs that are visible in 1.4. They did hesitantly provide some workarounds, stating that customers paying extra for support would receive corrections (keep in mind the implied warranty that law grants) sooner, but couldn't provide an explanation in the past weeks.

All the while in the past months, I've received multiple mails from Borland asking me for success stories in ten years of using Delphi or the migration from VCL to .NET. Sadly, they never answered me when I sent them misery stories of using Borland Delphi so far. Since People ask from time to time if we actually develop in Delphi, I've decided to post this, as a counterpost to Borlands success stories (while we still believe in the power of ObjectPascal, we've lost our faith in Delphi for future projects), and as a migration story from Borland Delphi to FreePascal and Lazarus, which will probably be the base for future Spybot-S&D versions.