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Thread: New Get Lazarus Initiative

  1. #1

    New Get Lazarus Initiative

    Author of Bare Game, the first SDL 2 based pascal framework. I am please to announce the launch of a new initiative to promote Free Pascal and Lazarus. The hub of this initiative is http://www.getlazarus.org


    The get Lazarus initiative aims to an reintroduce Lazarus to the software development world. To aide in this endeavor we've created our own special Lazarus bundles for Windows, Mac, and Linux with test versions of Free Pascal 3.0 Lazarus 1.4. We believe these bundles are the easiest Lazarus environments to install ever, and they won't interfere with your existing Free Pascal and Lazarus environments. We've also built-in support for full cross compile between platforms by default.


    Our initiative hub http://www.getlazarus.org is built on a new custom wiki engine which allows for creation of some highly interactive wiki pages. The showcase page http://www.getlazarus.org/community/showcase is a good example of this.


    We also have a new Lazarus forum http://www.getlazarus.org/forums themed to match the initiative. We're going to be looking for forum moderators and official wiki administrators soon. See this forum topic for consideration http://www.getlazarus.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3


    And finally we are forming a professional Free Pascal and Lazarus consultant network for select few community members. Members will be invited to participate in commercial software projects as requests are filtered through our site.


    Thank you to everyone for your attention and thank you for helping to promote Free Pascal and Lazarus! It's a great time to be a Lazarus fan!

  2. #2
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
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    The site looks great I thought Lazarus promotion was doing fine already but the more the merrier I've signed up to the forums and assuming the site takes off I'm quite happy to provide technical assistance to other members. Providing you don't try and make any money from the Lazarus + Freepascal development teams hard work of course I note that while you mention both Lazarus + Freepascal, there's no links at all to the project sites, something that if you're really trying to promote Lazarus, would be a good idea. You don't want to be another codetyphoon I assume!
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by phibermon View Post
    I note that while you mention both Lazarus + Freepascal, there's no links at all to the project sites, something that if you're really trying to promote Lazarus, would be a good idea. You don't want to be another codetyphoon I assume!
    This also brings some concerns in me. And these concers become even stronger after reading the legal section of the webpage which in short guards site owners from just about anything.
    So I went and done some more digging about the site domain and found out that there is already a similar domain http://getlazarus.com/ hich is offering something compleetly different. Now while this is not ileagal in most countries it is uncommon. And I do remember that there were some lawsuits about IP rights violation in similar cases (big companies involved).

    So in short I must say that I'm a bit skeptical about this. But that is just my opinion.

    EDIT: On GetLazarus webpage authors claim that they are offering Lazarus 1.4 version but latest version available on SourceForge is still 1.2.6.
    EDIT2: Oh and latest official version of FPC is 2.6.4. while autors of GetLazarus website claim thir pachage include FPC 3.0

    Would somebody care to eplain to me how something like this is posible? How can they offer newer versions of Lazarus and FPC than they are even available through their official sites?
    Last edited by SilverWarior; 04-02-2015 at 06:06 PM.

  4. #4
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by SilverWarior View Post
    EDIT: On GetLazarus webpage authors claim that they are offering Lazarus 1.4 version but latest version available on SourceForge is still 1.2.6.
    EDIT2: Oh and latest official version of FPC is 2.6.4. while autors of GetLazarus website claim thir pachage include FPC 3.0

    Would somebody care to eplain to me how something like this is posible? How can they offer newer versions of Lazarus and FPC than they are even available through their official sites?
    FPC 3.0 is the most current branch, it mainly brings better Unicode support but other than testing it's not reccomended for use. I'm not sure about Lazarus 1.4 but I'm guessing that's the latest development branch too.

    They're unstable and shouldn't be used for production. Hopefully nobody will have a bad experience with these unstable versions being promoted or the site will have the opposite effect!

    I'd personally like to see links to the project pages on the front of this new site. There's no good reason not to.

    The section on 'Consultation' annoys me as well, there's no such network as is claimed as the site has only just started also it seems like an attempt to hoover up skilled Lazarus developers and offer them as a service. There's nothing wrong with this per-say but given there's no links to the much larger and official communities I would interpret this as a scam on the Lazarus name that attempts to paint itself as the official point of contact for the software in the hope that commercial users seeking help will be misled into thinking that this is the only way to get help.

    Since they plan to charge for consultation, does that mean if I offer help to somebody looking for it on the forums that my posts will be deleted? being as it detracts from the business model of the site?

    --

    I'm sure our friend sysrpl doesn't intend such nefarious schemes so I look forward to seeing the Lazarus and Freepascal projects clearly linked to on the main page. It is after all a 'Lazarus Initiative' and what could be better to get people using Lazarus than linking up as much of the community as possible?
    Last edited by phibermon; 04-02-2015 at 06:19 PM.
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

  5. #5
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
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    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.
    Last edited by phibermon; 04-02-2015 at 06:32 PM.
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

  6. #6
    @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.
    Last edited by SilverWarior; 04-02-2015 at 07:29 PM.

  7. #7
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
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    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 :\
    Last edited by phibermon; 04-02-2015 at 08:01 PM.
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

  8. #8
    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.
    Last edited by Super Vegeta; 04-02-2015 at 09:47 PM.

  9. #9
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
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    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.
    Last edited by phibermon; 04-02-2015 at 10:16 PM.
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

  10. #10
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Super Vegeta View Post
    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.
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

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