New Get Lazarus Initiative

[phibermon]

From the development Environment section :

"Lazarus can be used to develop commercial software without restriction. You can sell your applications without the need to pay us for anything."

Note the use of the word "us".

Sounding more and more like an attempt to appear like it was the official Lazarus site. Given the consultation section and no links to the official projects?

I'll wait a few weeks to see how the owner operates the site but if it continues to look like a scam I'll take action to ensure that people are not duped.

[SilverWarior]

@phibermon
You are FPC/Lazarus user right? Have you seen any post on their official forums mentioning this in any way?

EDIT: Also what do you know about Bare Game?
It seems that the same user is also the author of Bare Game which is just a prebuild package of FPC/Lazarus and SDL 2 library.
And based on the Bare Game website http://www.baregame.org/ they are interested in using of the newly created comunity of http://www.getlazarus.org for developing a new version of Bare Game.

[phibermon]

I am, I used to be a developer as well although not for a few years (busy with my engine etc) I've not see any mentions of the 'getlazarus' site at all.

It's quite common for an individual to paint themselves as a group or organization (delusions of grandeur) so that's just a bit of self promotion in an attempt to be entrepreneurial, no harm done. It is dishonest however. I don't post as "phibermon software" talking about how the 'team' is developing the engine in order to seem more professional in the attempt to garner a larger user-base or prestige.

Loads of people do such things though, I find the attempts to be fairly obvious, transparent and a little bit sad. Honesty is the best policy. This is the programming world, such car salesmen tactics don't work on programmers, we're not stupid

---

I've seen the posts about Bare Game, I did rather like the easings demo, a nice way to demonstrate how various curve equations appear when animated.

But other than that I'm not interested at this stage, I'm currently working on transform feedback accelerated vector field optimizations to various path finding algorithms, specifically to handle real-time path finding on procedurally generated terrains and planets. Before that I implemented volumetric shadows with multiple light sources for my particle system. I have very few people to discuss such things with, none in the Pascal community. It's great to see all the new engines and things come out for Pascal but it'd be nice if there were more people into the bleeding edge stuff, I have nobody to talk to :\

[Super Vegeta]

The site looked quite polished and "professional", but I didn't really get to read all the text. Now it seems to be down. The author also made a leddit thread, where they briefly mentioned that GetL is not the official thing. Not sure what to think of it all.

EDIT: Oh, my bad, the site works, but only with "www". The "about us" and other pages contain your typical "I want to sound professional without releaving a thing about myself" blabber. And the forums already got their share of viagra spambots. I guess I was right to put professional in quotes.

[phibermon]

If there's something fishy going on then it'll be apparent sooner or later. If it's a legitimate attempt to spread the word of Lazarus without trying to monetize upon it then I'm all for it but with 'Codetyphon' blatantly trying to take credit for other peoples work I'm a little weary of people that package up Lazarus + Freepascal. There are full binaries available for every platform on the official site, a 'get lazarus' initiative does not need to repackage, certainly such an initiate should link to the original sites if the purpose was to promote Lazarus.

The fact as I mentioned earlier that the site using wording such as "us" in reference to Lazarus is at least cause to suspect that it might be a way of tricking unwitting users as being the official site. The 'consultation' section is also suggestive of an attempt to monetize upon this potential deception. "These people made Lazarus, they must be good, I'll pay their consultation fee" etc

Just for the record I offer consultation for free and their offer of 'vetting' potential employees would be illegal to act upon in both America and the United Kingdom due to the data protection laws in both of those countries. At best they can offer a vetting service only in the country in which they are based having a legal contract with the client company and full disclosure of that relationship to the potential employee (and that persons written, signed consent) Also anybody involved in the vetting process would have to be employed by one of the two, you can't just ask some random on the web to pour over somebodies personal details given in confidence by way of an application.

EDIT : From his Reddit post :

"One of my enhancements was to add in the anchor docking layout"

That's not *your*enhancement, that's been part of Lazarus for a while, you just enable it as part of the build. Which you did, but have worded your post as to suggest you created it.

Call me crazy but when enabling an option in a program, I don't then claim to have "enhanced" the program.

[sysrpl]

My name is Anthony Walter. I'm the owner of getlazarus.org, as well as the creator of baregame.org. I say this because I am not trying to hide. Just do a WHOIS on my domains. I've been running ad free software sites for more than fifteen years. All I've done is offer my projects to others for free. More than ten years ago I offered a great package of components on my blog:

http://www.codebot.org/delphi/

There zero ads on or asking for money on anything I've created on that site, and I never felt like I've taken undo credit or tried to steal from anyone, only give to people. Next on to Bare Game, it has been out for two years now and in that time I've never asked for a thing. The site has remained ad free, and all my sources have been hosted free and open. I'm not received much appreciation for it, but it doesn't bother me, as long as people are able to make use of what I've created. And now there is getlazarus.org, where care was taken to be free and open as well. Everything I've done is and has been on github, including my modifications in changes.diff. When you install my bundles, you get everything I have made. Heck even the windows installed script is online. I link to the github project page on my site.

https://github.com/sysrpl/Codebot.Setup

Even my website engine, which I wrote myself, is open and free on github .It's been free there for about a month now:

https://github.com/sysrpl/Codebot.Sh...er/Codebot.Web

Regarding the anchor docking comment on reddit you references, I said I "add in THE anchor docking layout", not MY. As in, my scripts/bundles make anchor docking THE default mode, as opposed to how Lazarus usually ships, which is multiple window mode. I didn't think people would take "THE anchor docking layout" to mean I am claiming to have created it.

Regarding the other domain, getlazarus.com, I'm not affiliated with it. I saw it existed before I purchased getlazarus.org last Saturday and didn't think it would be a big deal if someone other than me owned the .com TLD

Regarding the forums and spam, I've changed the default captcha to Q&A, removed up the spammers accounts, and deleted their posts. Mistakes happen, please foregive me.

Regarding the usage of "US" or "WE" when describing getlazarus.org, it's meant to infer a community initiative, rather than one person saying it's about ME, when it's not.

I said to an interview with a online Pascal magazine earlier today:

"I bought my first Mac in late 2013 just to complete the cross platform bridge. In the end, it's really all to much for one person (me) to handle, between my normal real life responsibilities, work, and my side projects (I'm no spring chicken). My hope in creating the get Lazarus initiative was to re-invigorate the Lazarus community, find some people in the community to mentor, and hand off these projects for them to maintain, rather than let everything I've privately worked on in the past fade away benefiting no one."

I hope this clear things up.

Edit: And about the legalese on my site, all we are saying is there are NO warranties, and don't try to hold us accountable if anything goes wrong. It's standard stuff.

[Carver413]

welcome back sysrpl i was alway's impressed with the bare game engine even thought I never got it to compile. my fault really because I'm not using the trunk version of fpc. I am a little disappointed at the welcome you recieved, I think you deserve better. anyway it is good to see your back and I hope things go a little better this time.

[phibermon]

The site looked quite polished and "professional", but I didn't really get to read all the text. Now it seems to be down. The author also made a leddit thread, where they briefly mentioned that GetL is not the official thing. Not sure what to think of it all.

EDIT: Oh, my bad, the site works, but only with "www". The "about us" and other pages contain your typical "I want to sound professional without releaving a thing about myself" blabber. And the forums already got their share of viagra spambots. I guess I was right to put professional in quotes.

Yeah it all smells very fishy. Maybe it'll turn out to be a selfless attempt to better promote Lazarus but I doubt it.

[SilverWarior]

I'm currently working on transform feedback accelerated vector field optimizations to various path finding algorithms, specifically to handle real-time path finding on procedurally generated terrains and planets. Before that I implemented volumetric shadows with multiple light sources for my particle system. I have very few people to discuss such things with, none in the Pascal community. It's great to see all the new engines and things come out for Pascal but it'd be nice if there were more people into the bleeding edge stuff, I have nobody to talk to :\

I could go and discus pathfinding algorithms with you. Probably my knowledge isn't as good as your but still. So yeah you have somebody to talk to if so desired.

[phibermon]

I could go and discus pathfinding algorithms with you. Probably my knowledge isn't as good as your but still. So yeah you have somebody to talk to if so desired.

Hey I love to talk about programming If you ever want to chat about designs and ideas then I'd love to