Inprise Corp – the former Borland International Inc – has finally offloaded off its aging dBASE low-end database product line to a group of dBASE developers. On Friday, the Scotts Valley, California-based company announced an exclusive international licensing agreement with Ksoft Inc, based in Johnson City, New York. Ksoft assumes all development, support and marketing for the Windows database and development tool.
Borland acquired the dBASE product line from Ashton Tate back in 1991, but by the mid-1990s the popularity of xBase product lines began to rapidly wane. Borland developed its newer generation Delphi development tool to combat Microsoft’s Visual Basic. It off its other low-end proprietary database tool, Paradox, to Corel Corp in 1996 (CI No 3,026), and many commentators expected it to sell-off dBASE at the same time. Last year, under its new Inprise name and with a new enterprise focus, the company transferred responsibility for dBASE into its Interbase Software Corp subsidiary, now a part of the recently formed borland.com division. The current version is Visual dBASE 7.
Ksoft says it has already started planning the next release, under the name dBASE 2000, with a tentative release date of late spring, early summer this year, and will issue quarterly releases from then on. It promises fixes, performance and ease of use enhancements, and extensions, including new web capabilities. Ksoft was formed in 1995 out of the remains of ApTech Inc, developers of the Abraxas product line of dBASE applications. Run by dBASE developer Alan Katz, the company has specialized in custom Windows and Web e-commerce development using Visual dBASE. Negotiations took place over ten weeks after Inprise approached Ksoft with the idea.
Ashton Tate first launched its dBASE low-end database development tools for DOS in 1984. Computer Associates International Inc followed with the Clipper dBASE compatible and Microsoft Corp launched FoxPro. After threatened litigation over the dBASE name, cloners termed the coin Xbase. At its peak, over one third of all DOS-based commercial applications were written in Xbase. Windows equivalents such as Visual dBase, Visual FoxPro and CA’s Visual Objects followed, but declined in the face of a new generation of development tools such as Visual Basic.
