Hello all,

I've had some interesting conversation with few people on how to help Lazarus (and FPC) to be more popular in the industry and on FOSS projects. Someone suggested to go to companies that are based on Delphi and GUI applications, and help them test Lazarus as a tool not only as a Cross Platform development, but as a better way to program code in general.

Personally I want to find connections in few of the companies I know of in my country that work with Delphi in order to show Lazarus and help them use it.

What do you think on the subject, and how would you make the projects more popular and in use ?

Ido
http://ik.homelinux.org/

That might be a good idea but I'm far from sure about that.

I know this will appear to be simply contrary, but why do you want to do this? What is your goal? What do you expect to be the outcome? Have you thought about what can go wrong?

I ask these questions because I've found that unless you have clear answers it can lead to problems, especially as more people are recruited to help. Everyone has a different motivation and expectation.

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 01:17, Doug Chamberlin <

1. I want to do it, because I want to see Pascal as a whole and FPC and Lazarus as part of it more in use, because I think the way the industry works is plain wrong, and I see the problem because of it on a daily basis, when tools are chosen because "everybody use it", and not because they can deliver what you need, and I think that FPC and Lazarus have a lot to offer in order to make the industry better.

2. My personal goal is to make my life easier by not using C, C++, C# and Java, just because they the main tools in the industry. Also, one of the things that I make money of, is teaching companies how to work better with tools after they have a lot of issues and looking to solve it by someone on the outside that can see things different from the people who made the problems.
This is one way for me to solve it. I think that both Lazarus and FPC can replace C, C++ and even Java on many places and make the life of people much easier.
Another goal of mine, is to make more use of Open Source and less use of propriety tools. I think the economical way that the industry is going, only hurts progress and not help progress, and I do believe that open source helps progress.

3. I want people in the industry to choose Lazarus -> FPC as a tool, and that way make more patches, fixes and add more features, and also promote themselves that way.

4. The worst case scenario is that no one will listen or care what I have to offer. The best case scenario is to see better tools in use, and change the way "problem solving" happens today.

Hello,

Personally I don't think you will achieve much, if anything, trying to get small companies to use Lazarus / FPC.

IMHO what would really help Lazarus / FPC would be:

1> Companies interested in not only using FPC, but also investing in it or
2> A big open source project which uses Lazarus / FPC

I don't think you will succeed in number 1, unless you yourself climbs to a high position in a company or you start a new sucessfull company whose business involves FPC.

So I would recommend number 2 instead. There are many possible big open source projects which could be started with Lazarus / FPC, but I would personally recommend building a Window Manager, because it creates a large ecosystem with a lot of software built with Lazarus / FPC. Later this ecosystem of desktop applications can also be made available in other platforms, like KDE does. Why do you think Qt puts so much money in KDE? Because it is a huge push to their platform. I once talked to KDE developers if the would like my magnifier glass program in KDE. The answer: It's not made in C++/Qt ? No way! Doesn't matter if it was way better then what they had at the time.

And the same would a Lazarus Window Manager do: Total preference for FPC software (We can be open minded and accept Lazarus / FPGUI / MSEGUI Apps).

A long time ago I contributed to the Free Pascal Window Manager, but I didn't have enough free time available:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fpwm

And now I cannot put the amount of effort needed in a non-payed project.

If you like the idea, but you don't want to write the code yourself you could also try to get people to donate money for such a project.

One thing you can do to make it more popular is to make it install properly w/o having to fight with the installer, and having to download, compile, reinstall, then finally give up because it just plain didn't work.
I've tried twice to get this ide to work on osx, and gave it up twice as a bad deal. I generally now just delete emails regarding this product, because for me, it's simply a waste of time. Fix the distribution so that it installs cleanly on osx, and folks (at least those using osx) might actually try the thing.

Zitat von Travis Siegel :

What packages did you install?
What problem did you have?

Mattias

Without lots of OSX users trying it on their systems how is that going to happen? Where will the feedback come from?

Since all Lazarus users are programmers it may be better to find out what build scripts are used for the OSX version, try them out repeatedly tiill they are fixed.

_______________________________________________ fpc-other maillist - http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other

You should just unsubscribe from the list, then you won't have to delete any more emails.

Fix the distribution so that it installs cleanly on osx, and folks (at least those using osx) might actually try the thing.

Like Frank said, Chicken and egg problem. You, as a developer, probably have the means of fixing this, if you care to spend time on it.

Henry

Henry Vermaak wrote

You should just unsubscribe from the list, then you won't have to delete any more emails.

Excellent advice, only I was under the impression this was the fpc list, not the 3-rd party ide add-ons list.
Andif I did that, then I'd not get emails about the other parts of fpc which i do still use.
(any other useful tips?)

It's true that I probably have the means to fix it. However, for my purposes, it's not worth the effort to fix something I can't/don't use. I doubt you'd bother taking the time to fix something related to osx if you're a windows user. Same thing here. I don't need the ide, so for me it's no loss that it doesn't work. I was simply stating one of the reasons it may not be used by more people.
Fpc itself works quite well for me under osx, it's just things like pascocoa and ides like lazarus that don't, and for my purposes, that's perfectly acceptable, as I'm not really concerned with the gui aspects anyhow.
I'd of course be willing to assist if someone wanted tow ork on the problem, but it's not a priority for me, so it makes no difference to me whether it works or not.
Thus the suggestion of getting it working, so others who actually want/ need it will/can use it.

Gui environments have never been my thing anyway, so I'm not the least bit put out by it not working in my case.
But as I said, I'm perfectly willing to help someone else get it working, only nobody else has offered.
And before you jump on the "I'm just waiting for someone else to make it work"bandwagon, let me point out that I don't now (nor have in the past) used any kind of gui tool when there was a command-line utility that would do the job in it's place.
Hope this clears things up.

Good point, this is the fpc-other list, I thought you were referring to the lazarus list. I'm afraid I'm all out of tips for the day.

Thus the suggestion of getting it working, so others who actually want/need it will/can use it.

No need, since I believe it already works for some people. This is the point and that's what makes your bug reports valuable, so that it can be prevented that other people hit the same problems.

Gui environments have never been my thing anyway, so I'm not the least bit put out by it not working in my case. But as I said, I'm perfectly willing to help someone else get it working, only nobody else has offered.

Have you reported any bugs for your problems?

Henry