[pkphilip]

Yes, the Delphi licensing cost is horrible. However, if you are using Lazarus you don't need to use Delphi at all.

The lack of sufficient developers who are familiar with Lazarus/Freepascal is a problem though. But again, this is a chicken and egg type of issue.

Getting up to speed in Lazarus does not take very long though because the IDE itself guides a person through in the components and you can clearly see the properties and components they have etc.

Compared to the challenge of wrangling many of these cross-platform frameworks to develop a desktop, it is a piece of cake in Lazarus.

Sadly, what keeps Lazarus back is the fact that most people aren't even aware that it exists and a perceived notion that it is not a cool/capable framework.