I honestly think this conversation would be better served asking questions like

How can Lazarus get noticed more?
How can Lazarus get more exposure/adoption?
How can Lazarus get industry sponsorship?
How can Lazarus get educational institutions to explore development using Lazarus/FPC?

IMO, a larger percentage of the development space is something that can be attained. Support for alternative operating systems like linux and offer a break from Microsoft (namely via Ubuntu) should be a marketing sweet spot.

Library support for hot topic Information Technologies. FPC/Lazarus must follow trends and include components. A broad range of component support is essential.

Example: Social is trendy so FPC/Lazarus should come with components to interface with Craigslist / Facebook / Twitter / Google . Access requires http or https requests so openssl would need to be more fully developed.

IMO, the bottom line is - the more components supported the easier Lazarus makes it for a developer to download and develop what they need. MORE IS MORE.

I often find myself needing a library ported to FPC. Recently I came across the Lucene project. With Lucene developers can create full text search / document searches. I need a lucene component or something like it. Enterprise search is BIG. It would be ideal. Then you get in the search engines for Lucene keyword and voila - a developer is going to evaluate Lazarus/FPC for adoption. But the more developed these components are the better chance will be for the developer to recommend Lazarus. And for the firm/institution will approve it.

Having used FPC/Lazarus for 3 years now I have to say I'm impressed on how long and far these two projects have come. More components, and since development team is limited - chose wisely when tapping into trendy development networks.

Exposure by way of component ports. Components need to be native to FPC and when a component in implemented a concerted effort needs to be made to make sure Links back to FPC/Lazarus must be placed, and the Lazarus Wiki should be updated with a dedicated page for that component and an HTTP link BACK to the targeted components' page.

Andrew Brunner wrote

Example: Social is trendy so FPC/Lazarus should come with components to interface with Craigslist / Facebook / Twitter / Google . Access requires http or https requests so openssl would need to be more fully developed.

For adding components someone needs to have
a) the time
and
b) the interest
to implement them. I don't doubt that there are developers that have both, but maybe they want to spent their time on other features that they want to see implemented in Lazarus first.

(Note: I myself don't have (b) ;) )

There is the ioda search engine which is written in Free Pascal. I have never tried it yet, but it's on my radar:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ioda/

Regards,
Sven

Yes, more components improve the chance of an developer recommend Lazarus. I do it, because the team made by Lazarus+FPC is very powerful. If the Lazarus Team will follow this philosophy (more is better), my contribution is the PascalSCADA project, and if it's adopted, I'll drop the Delphi support from it (I'm thinking when I'll drop the Delphi support, it increases my headaches).

The development of project website is stopped now, but in some days I'll put something like that "PascalSCADA recomends Lazarus+FPC" to convert Delphi users in Lazarus users.

Which I think is one reason why a potential port of FPC onto the IBM mainframe architecture is interesting. As I understand it, C is far less popular in that environment and there is a fair amount of legacy Pascal code: providing a mature development environment which would allow projects to move in both directions could be popular.

But one problem there is that by the time the component has been written/documented/marketed today's hot topic is very much yesterday's. What's more, if the owner of the service expects people to use it via HTML or Flash, and anybody doing a mashup is used to doing that type of job PHP/Perl/Python, then an attempt to muscle in could be met with hostility.