All,

As many of you know, we have changed the licensing model, name and pricing of JBuilder Foundation, now known as JBuilder 5 Personal for several reasons and I'd like to take this opportunity to share our reasoning behind these changes with you, our customers.

1. The features and functionality of JBuilder Foundation were actually sufficient for many users so that the need to actually purchase Pro or Enterprise versions from Borland was lessened or simply not necessary. This allowed customers to be able to standardize on Foundation for their Java development needs without purchasing licenses from Borland. While Foundation was intended as seeding mechanism for JBuilder, the unintended side effect was a reduction in Professional and Enterprise sales. We have cases where large companies standardized on Foundation as their IDE and did not need or want to purchase JBuilder licenses from us. Foundation was available as a purchased product for $49.95 and as a free download from our web site.

2. We had a choice, to remove functionality from the Foundation, rendering it a much lesser product or to change the licensing terms and limit the product's use for non-commercial development purposes only. We thought the better choice is to leave all the great productivity features in JBuilder Personal, but to limit it's use to learning Java programming or to create applications for non business reasons. For those customers that would be realizing the benefits of JBuilder in a business setting, we felt it would be fair if they could share the benefits of their increased efficiency with Borland through purchases of Professional or Enterprise versions.

We feel we made the best choice, to not limit the functionality of Personal, but to only narrow the scope of it use through a change in licensing terms. So, starting in JBuilder 5 we renamed Foundation to the new name "Personal" and included a license that allows JBuilder to be used for personal, non-commercial purposes.

3. Since we have value added items in the box with the product CD such as documentation and learning materials, we felt a price of $99 more accurately reflected the cost to produce and manufacture the product and still provide Borland with a fair return on its investment for this package. Personal will still be available as a web download without cost in July.

In summary, I can understand the concern that many of you have regarding the changes in the pricing and licensing structure from JBuilder Foundation to JBuilder Personal, but I believe we have taken the best possible approach given the circumstances. JBuilder Foundation was actually my idea (okay I'll take the credit and the heat) and was a very successful seeding mechanism for JBuilder in 1999 and 2000. Except for the changes I've mentioned, we will continue to make this version available to all developers who would like to use it.

I would also like to say thank you *very much* for your support of Borland products and especially JBuilder over the years. In my 10 years at Borland, I have always been extremely proud of the work our people have done on a daily basis...building such unbelievably great products and selling them to the best and most loyal customers in the world.

If we provide a product with high value, at a fair price and support it to the best of our ability, I believe Borland's success will soar and in turn, so will our customers fortunes.

Best Regards, Tony

2001-May-25 11:27am gyles19@visi.com