The Lazarus project can certainly be helped by more people, there is still a lot of work to do. I think that the coordinating persons are generally agreed to be Cliff Baseman,
Michael Hess
and
Shane Miller.
I think they would be happy to provide the necessary guidelines.

As to the Interbase components, I think that:
1) Integrating it in Lazarus is not really an option, since it is GPL'ed code and hence you cannot ask money for it. But the others may disagree on this. IMHO the best thing would be simply to make sure that it compiles with Free Pascal, and provide it as an extra...

2) If the components are non-visible, then they should better be incorporated into the lower-level FCL (Free Component Library); the database layer (TDataset etc) is implemented in the FCL. If that is the case, I would be very willing to help, since I use Interbase a lot for my (payed) work =-)

Some time ago I made some changes to FreeUDF interbase components so they compiled with Free Pascal, I see no reason why it couldn't be done with these components as well.

Michael.

Yes; but you can perfectly mix the two in a project; i.e. it is not because Free Pascal or Lazarus are LGPL'ed, that a developer must release his code also under the LGPL.

Michael.

Hi,

My name is Dalton Calford and I am one of the founding members of the Interbase Developers Initiative.

With the current upheavels at Inprise in regards to Interbase, alot of developers are joining us and asking how to help.

One of the other founding members, Jason Wharton, has asked me to contact you to get your opinion on the porting of his code base to Lazarus. He has a very extensive group of components that he releases as binaries to commercial entities, and as full source to anybody who asks as long as they pay him his fees when they start making money.
In the past week, in order to become even more friendly to the open source movement, he has opening started releasing his code on a "trustware" model.

He wants to know how/if it is possible to merge his code base into yours while still retaining an income from it (he still has a family and mortgage to deal with). In the interbase community, his code base is considered the best for database access.

As to the helping with the lazarus project, I have been directly contacted by 35 different developers whose code is well known in the Delphi community. They are all offering to help, as long as they are given some guidence as to what needs to be addressed.

So I guess what I am asking for is, can the project be helped by throwing more developers at it, and if so, where and who will coordinate it?

best regards

Dalton

That is correct but the way that the letter was written indicated that the individual would like to receive money for their source code. The LGPL allows you to build applications and charge for them but NOT charge for the source code aka the library.

The Lazarus LCL Lazarus Component Library is under the LGPL with the IDE being GPL'd code
to comply with the Free Pascal VCL which is distributed under the LGPL also I was under the impression.

Is that correct MVC?

Cliff

In regards to helping the project, the answer would be YES. We are in need of some developers at this time to assist in many aspects of the project. We currently have a HOWTO that assists new project participants to get our code and get set up to help. What we need for new developers is a "map" on how to add new components, the current status of components, and a good "What needs to be done.". We currently don't have that. We have really been simply trying to get an editor up and running that is based on our code. We are close, but there are a few linux OS specific things we need to work around.

I would advise any new developer to look at our code as it currently exists, look at the mailing list and our web pages and ask questions based on what they see. What I will do is draw up an HTML document that describes our layout of compoents, the way things are setup, and hopefully some useful information on how to add code.

As it stands now, we have the basic components, TForm, TButton, TCheckbox, TToolbar, TEdit, TNotebook, TMenu, TRadiobutton, TCombobox, etc. We need help cleaning up the code and finishing off the actual implementation of these components. Some of them display fine but have no real underlying functionality or are missing a few features. Plus, because we are doing this in a fashion that allows us to be "widget" independant, we ould use a lot of help creating the controls using the QT widget set.

As you see, there is a lot to do, but I can't say we are organized enough to say exactly where we need the help. We are more than happy for others to jump in, look at our code, see what's missing and add the code needed.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them to the mailing list. In the mean time I will develop a page that can be used by someone wishing to become involved in this project.

Thanks for your interest and feel free to jump in.

Shane

>> 01/10/00 09:36AM >>>

Hi,

My name is Dalton Calford and I am one of the founding members of the Interbase Developers Initiative.

With the current upheavels at Inprise in regards to Interbase, alot of developers are joining us and asking how to help.

One of the other founding members, Jason Wharton, has asked me to contact you to get your opinion on the porting of his code base to Lazarus. He has a very extensive group of components that he releases as binaries to commercial entities, and as full source to anybody who asks as long as they pay him his fees when they start making money.
In the past week, in order to become even more friendly to the open source movement, he has opening started releasing his code on a "trustware" model.

He wants to know how/if it is possible to merge his code base into yours while still retaining an income from it (he still has a family and mortgage to deal with). In the interbase community, his code base is considered the best for database access.

As to the helping with the lazarus project, I have been directly contacted by 35 different developers whose code is well known in the Delphi community. They are all offering to help, as long as they are given some guidence as to what needs to be addressed.

So I guess what I am asking for is, can the project be helped by throwing more developers at it, and if so, where and who will coordinate it?

best regards

Dalton

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