It's long overdue but is still crippling for the ecosystem. If you want to learn, that's great but if you want to make a business out of it then there are still too many restrictions for majority of non-Delphi developers. A revenue of $5000 prohibiting use from the Community Edition is crazy low, especially when it isn't even profit. The cheapest version of Delphi 10.2 Tokyo right now is on sale for $1,196, which means that once you hit $5k in revenue you would have to spend 20% of that revenue on licensing your IDE if you want to keep going and remain compliant.
Now, take a look at the Visual Studio Community license terms[0]. They, too, have a revenue restriction but it is $1 million but they also throw in a PC count of at least 250 PCs. Once you hit that threshold you will have to spend $499 on the lowest paid version of Visual Studio in order to keep on making your software.
That said, if one is wanting to learn Delphi then I would recommend Free Pascal with Lazarus instead as it handles cross platform easier than Delphi does and it is free.
The only reason I've started with Delphi back in the day (and loved it) was because everything was pirated in Ukraine circa year 2000, so nobody would even care about licensing/price point.
I used Delphi versions 2-7 many years ago when I was learning to code, some were free versions some were pirated ones.
Then I moved to other web languages (PHP, JS, HTML, CSS) and then few years ago I discovered free Lazarus/FPC combo.
It's stable and has single huge advantage - it runs flawlessly on Linux/OSX/Windows/FreeBSD and can compile binaries for other OSes and architectures even on ARM(Raspberry Pi).
Lately I've found UniDAC database components by devart.com for Delphi/Lazarus and loved them instantly.
I also think Delphi Community version is too little, too late with such a good and cheap alternative.
Lazarus / FPC definitely looks good, I'll check it out! (I still have Delphi 7 installed on one of the machines, so I haven't looking around for alternatives - for what it appears to be 12+ years now).
One thing I liked was how quickly one could bang out a simple GUI application. Sometimes, that's all I need.
They have been doing this for at least a year or more. The license is incredibly restrictive. Lazarus IDE is pretty much equal now, minus the extra "mobile" bells and whistles that Delphi has.
Now, take a look at the Visual Studio Community license terms[0]. They, too, have a revenue restriction but it is $1 million but they also throw in a PC count of at least 250 PCs. Once you hit that threshold you will have to spend $499 on the lowest paid version of Visual Studio in order to keep on making your software.
That said, if one is wanting to learn Delphi then I would recommend Free Pascal with Lazarus instead as it handles cross platform easier than Delphi does and it is free.