Man I just got around to hitting the Borland site to check on the prices. They want $800 for Delphi Professional and $250 to upgrade to it. That alone is going to drive alot of people our way.

This has some imprortant consequences concerning versions of the RTL/FCL/GTK and so on that Lazarus distributes; but these can be discussed later.

I was working on the assumption that the class library code we are working on would become part of the FCL. Is that not your vision???

Lazarus would then be an application all be it an IDE that would be built using the FCL class libraries.

P Jean dit Bailleul wrote

It depends on the kind of licence of lazarus. If every lazarus application must be disrtibuted with all sources, i'm sure that it this will pull away a lot of compagnies.

Well you've brought up a very good point. What is the licensing here? I myself plan on producing commercial product and I don't want to have to deliver my source. I don't mind delivering the free pascal and the lazarus source but I don't want to deliver the source I create using them.

I know we haven't exactly spelled out the license for lazarus yet but where is the license for FPC? I'm not in my office with all the source right now but I can't find it on the web what is the license for all of this work????

----- Original Message -----

Michael A. Hess wrote

Man I just got around to hitting the Borland site to check on the prices. They want $800 for Delphi Professional and $250 to upgrade to it. That alone is going to drive alot of people our way.

You are complaining ? these are the prices I paid for it in Belgium ! An upgrade to Delphi 4 professional cost me 400$ one year ago!!

Michael.

Ahhh. Got ya. I wasn't think in those terms. I would assume that if you are distributing something that the user needs to recompile you are suppling all of the source. Otherwise you need to distribute a library and not a PPU. FPC will change more frequently than say Delphi which allowed the distrubution of DCU files because the compiler itself didn't change over time.

Yes, did I contradict this ?

I meant that if you distribute a compiled class library, and the user installs a newer version of FPC, then at each compile of his program, the compiler will try to recompile the while class library, because the RTL that comes with FPC is newer than the class library e.g. you distributed.

Michael.

The compiler comes under the GNU GPL, the RTL is under the LGPL; this means that you can link the RTL in your applications, and still ask money for the application; The final product is in NO WAY endangered by this license.

You can read all this in the file COPYING which is in the RTL sources directory.

Michael.

Cliff" wrote

Something you build with lazarus does not have to be distributed with source that is up to the author.

Maybe we should get that in writing somewhere and put it on the web site as well.

Exactly; the Delphi 3 RTL and VCL come compiled and don't change until a
new release is out; ususally more than a year;

This is different for FPC; it just means that you must be a little careful when releasing; e.g. don't release somthing that can only be compiled with the latest-latest snapshot.

The FPC team will of course do its best to change the units as little as possible; but you've no doubt noticed that this is not easy :-)

Michael.

Something you build with lazarus does not have to be distributed with source that is up to the author.

Cliff

That's only since delphi, because with tp there were a lot of probs with tp5/tp6/tp7 upgrading without having sources of the used tpu's

A nice way to distribute is to have a library and a interface with source which is just a bunch of external; things.

Another thing about PPU. These are made in such way that unknown entries can be skipped so when we reach a level of mature then we can build compilers which can read multiple versions of PPU's

Peter

I assumed this is how it was even though I had never checked which license things were under. I wasn't in my office so I couldn't check the source directories and the earlier question just got me to thinking.

So there it is folks. To put it in simple terms. You don't have to distribute source code with any application you BUILD with the compiler. You only have to distribute code that is USED by the compiler.

It ends up being basically the same as the Delphi license except that in Delphi Borland owns the VCL and in FPC the world owns the FCL. :-)

----- Original Message -----
From: P Jean dit Bailleul

I don't mind distributing FPC and GTK+ sources, nor do I mind distributing full Lazarus and my app source when I'm using Lazarus/FPC to create a custom app for a single business. They are paying for my time and effort and will quite likely want to be able to maintain the app on their own. However, I would like to be able to choose to restrict custom components I create for Lazarus for more widespread sales. Even then, I'd probably go with free binaries and a one-time fee for binaries/source of *MY* custom components. Whether this meets Open Source, I'm not sure, but after reading the Open Source article, I *think* it does.

Derek

you wrote

Man I just got around to hitting the Borland site to check on the prices. They want $800 for Delphi Professional and $250 to upgrade to it. That alone is going to drive alot of people our way.

It depends on the kind of licence of lazarus. If every lazarus application must be disrtibuted with all sources, i'm sure that it this will pull away a lot of compagnies.
For example, I'm sure that I won't be able to make my boss agree on the use of lazarus in this case even if I'm sure that over 99.99% of the user won't be able to use the source to do anything.

JDB

les opinions et recommandations exprim�es dans ce courrier sont ceux de l'auteur, ils ne sont pas n�cessairement endoss�s par Agritulture et AgroAlimentaire Canada
-------------------------------------------------------------- Philippe JEAN DIT BAILLEUL
Agriculture & AgroAlimentaire Canada - Agriculture & AgriFood Canada Email :
Web : Http://res.agr.ca/swinenet/porcexpert/jeanditbailleulp Tel : +1 (819) 565 9174 poste 251
Fax : +1 (819) 564 5507

This is essentially correct; your custom compononts link in the RTL, FCL and whatever, but they are still separate from it. As such you can choose not to disclose them.

You cannot do this with the lazarus components of course.

Be also aware that distributing the lazarus code, and not the code for your components, is of no use: If the user changes lazarus components that your code depends on, he must recompile your components to be able to work with it. If you don't give the source, your customer has a problem :)

This has some imprortant consequences concerning versions of the RTL/FCL/GTK and so on that Lazarus distributes; but these can be discussed later.

Michael.

They could use 0.99.12b (soon to be available) as next stable compiler. Almost all bugfixes in the 0.99.13 are also applied in that version.

Peter

This is the basic plan. Up until now this hasn't been possible because some of the features required by the class libraries being developed (like Dispatch) still needed some clean up. I think once FPC is at an official 1.0 release this will most definitly be how things are done. At that point most people will be using binary releases of FPC and not pulling from CVS. I think for the most part we are already there since I can't remember the last time we had a problem that had anything to do with the compiler. It is mostly just our own coding causing problems now. :-)

Some minor stuff still needs adding to the compiler before we release 1.0; And the inevitable bug-fixing, of course.

At the moment, I have finished designing the 'resourcestring' section. All that I will say at the moment, is that international language support will be much more powerful&customizable than the Delphi mechanism, while still based on the resourcestring section.

This should go into the compiler before we release 1.0

Michael.