New Get Lazarus Initiative

[phibermon]

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?

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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?