Is there an alternative to Delphi and Altium Designer for the developer? (Software Licensing)?

Question

Delphi

There is a task of licensing software for a company engaged in automation of production (Ukraine). All the necessary licenses, except for two, have been purchased. The first is P-CAD 2001\2002 (PCB design), the second is Delphi 7 (a program for user interaction and device programming). Due to the fact that modern development environments are not cheap:
Embarcadero Delphi XE2 Professional (former Borland Delphi): ~$1000;
Embarcadero Delphi XE2 Enterprise: ~$1600
Altium Designer 12 for 1 year (former P-CAD): ~$
5250 Altium Designer 12 Lifetime: ~$
6350 Total: $7350
question: how to minimize software costs? Are there cheaper/free alternatives to the above programs?Ideally, most of the functionality should be supported and “migration” to them should be the least laborious.
A few more questions:
Is it a good replacement for Delphi Lazarus ? How compatible are they? Is it worth contacting him at all?
Is it possible to officially buy used software (nominal license) so that all rights are transferred to the buyer and not violate any license agreements?
ps In the description of the Delphi XE2 Starter Media Kit DVD (~$40) I read the following: a license with the right to use until your income from Delphi applications reaches $1000. What kind of income is meant - annual income or total? If a company buys a license for an employee, for example, and then buys this software from him for $1,000, will it be legal? Or, for example, if I become a state of emergency and buy such a version for a neighbor, and then I buy a program from him for $ 200 to transfer to the company, how suspicious is this and will the inspectors find fault?)
Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Having considered all the available options, I settled on the following products:
Replacement of Delphi - Lazarus or Delphi XE2 Starter ~$250 (provided that there are enough basic components, of course). Comparison of Delphi versions (pdf)
P-CAD replacement — www.diptrace.com/rus/ ~ $20-330 (depending on the number of pins and layers).
Results:
Estimated initial cost of solving the problem - $ 7350
Economical cost of solving the problem, taking into account the compatibility of solutions: $ 250 + 250 = $ 500
Savings, so to speak)

Answer 2

If it is possible to rewrite software in C ++, then the ideal option is Qt

Answer 3

> Will it be a good replacement for Delphi Lazarus? How compatible are they?
It will fit, they must be compatible, try it.

Answer 4

As one of the options: I advise you to write to Dmitry Kuzmenko at ibase.ru, maybe he will advise cheap options. The company in which I worked took Turbo Delphi 2006 Professional from him for 8000 rubles per license, but they could already run out
. You should also ask people close to the embarcadero about a used license. At one time there was a topic on sql.ru that raised this issue. As far as I remember, they came to the conclusion that licenses cannot be transferred / resold.
The FreePascal/Lazarus and Delphi languages ​​are partially compatible. The problem is in the components that you have in Delphi 7, which may not be available under Lazarus. If Lazarus is really interesting, then it is worth writing a detailed description of the project (technologies used) and asking a question on their forum.
Delphi XE2 Starter is not sold to legal entities, only to private traders. And about writing programs on the starter as an individual entrepreneur and selling the result for a symbolic amount, I myself thought :) at first glance, everything is legal.

Answer 5

To develop boards, you can use the quite budgetary CadSoft Eagle www.cadsoftusa.com/shop/pricing/?language=en
Having left for free bread, I switched to it from PCAD 2006, and I do not regret it in general. The Standard version will almost certainly be enough for you.

Answer 6

There is another good alternative - https://www.devart.com/dac.html