New Get Lazarus Initiative

[SilverWarior]

@sysrpl
First I would like to apologize for my initial skepticizm. As phibermon noted in one of his earlier posts there was a group in the past that tried to earn money on others hard work by offering slightly modified lazarus as their own product.
I think that you can understand that pascal game development comunity can not afford to knowingly or unkowingly advertize such group as it would seriously hurt our image with rest of pascal comunities. That is the main reason why both phibermon and me who are staff members of PGD site reacted this way.
I hope thee are no hard feeling from your toward us becouse of that.

Now in order for you to avoid rasing similar skepticizm with other pascal comunities or other pascal develoeprs I'm going to give you next few friendly recomendations:
1. As phibermon also stated it would be good if on your sites (both GetLazarus and Bare Game) you clearly state that you are only providing modified versions of FPC and Lazarus projects which are mainly maintained by their developer groups. Don't forget to provide links to heir official websites.
2. You should alow potential users to clearly see what changes have you made to both Lazarus and FPC before packing them into your project.
3. You should clearly define intetnions of the comunity you are creating.
4. You should post links to already existing comunities so it doesen't seem as you are trying to overtake them
5. You should cmore clearly define what "consultation services" do you provide on how would that work. If you want to charge for these that is your choice but you should make potential users aware of this and how would the price be defined in such case.
By folowing these sugestion I think you can greatly improve your image to the rest of the pascal comunity which I belive is something that you would want to do.

[sysrpl]

@SilverWarior;

Thank you for your considerate reply. We've been discussing things both on the official pascal+lazarus mailing lists, as well as on forum.lazarus.freepascal.org

What I suggested and and others agreed to was to, like any other wiki, provide extern hyper links, the ones with orange arrows next to them. These extern hyper links are keyed on the word "Lararus" linking it to www.lazarus.freepascal.org on any page the first time the word appears (unless it's bolded as a topic first). This same rule applies to "Free Pascal". With the help of some editors, we've already got this done.

With regards to the changes we've made to Lazarus, they are mostly covered in the What's New page. There are some technical details where I personally believe super user rights should not be required to install software if it can be avoided, and to this end I've made the installers always keep everything confined to one folder off your $HOME folder. Anything that needs to change is in that folder and it doesn't interfere with any other folder on your computer, save for optionally installing an easily accessible shortcut (totally optional). If you want to get rid of our bundle, just delete that one folder and it's gone. On Windows I do install create start menu items, just for convenience so users can go to Start and type "Laz" and see the words "Lazarus 1.4 Test". In that case running the uninstaller deleted the start menu folder as well.

Another point, all out changes are in changes.diff which is the preferred method to share modifications wit the Lazarus and the Free Pascal teams. The changes.diff comes with every install and is located in the root of the lazarus folder. On Linux we actually just ship the source and build everything for you, applying:

patch -p0 -i $BASE/lazarus/changes.diff

in our install script, which is hosted here github and clearly denoted on our site:

http://github.com/sysrpl/Codebot.Set...c-3.0.linux.sh

Now whether we are going to repeat everything stated above somewhere on getlazarus.org is being considered. I personally weigh in on No, as I prefer to keep things simple and unencumbered with unnecessary information for the majority of our visitors, though we haven't fully decided yet.

And finally, with regards to codetyphon, yes we are aware of them. Your concern is understandable and well founded. I don't know how to communicate any degree of trust on this issue other than to say, look at my previous work, look at the fact that I don't sell anything on any of my site, be they ads or software. All I can say is I understand your concern.

[phibermon]

Ok my apologies also for my initial skepticism, I look forward to seeing links to the official project pages on your site. Given your commitment to open source and the Lazarus project itself, I'm sure you wouldn't want anybody to mistake getlazarus.org for the actual project pages, especially since you plan to monetize on the community with your consultation plans. It could easily be misconstrued as an attempt to mislead people, which given your comments you'd surely be horrified at the prospect of.

EDIT : I see you have now changed the front page and linked 'Lazarus' and 'Free Pascal' to the official project pages (it may help people if you included some text specifically stating that these are the official sites)

I wish you the best of luck with your initiative and I will try to put some time aside to provide technical assistance on the forums

[sternas]

Oh, my...

[phibermon]

12 years and that's the best you can come up with? aren't you the guy that 'makes' codetyphon?

[sternas]

Oh my... again

[phibermon]

That's George Takei's catchphrase - I see re-appropriation is a hobby of yours.

Seriously though it would be interesting to hear where you stand on the subject of misrepresentation when it comes to open source projects.

Do you think it's morally correct? what benefits do you feel it brings to the community?

[sysrpl]

Here's the manual setup guide for Windows I previously mentioned. If you're uncomfortable running automated installers on getlazarus.org, the guide below has step by step instructions on how to make everything yourself from svn sources.

http://www.getlazarus.org/setup/making/

Again, for a Linux guide, just consult the Linux setup script which contains similar steps along with comments.

https://github.com/sysrpl/Codebot.Se...c-3.0.linux.sh

[paul_nicholls]

@SilverWarior - I have attached a screenshot of the files my Avast put into the virus chest...I don't have the actual files anymore as I uninstalled it.
@sysrpl - thanks, I will have a look at the setup guide you made for Windows



cheers,
Paul