[lazarus] Helping with the project

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Dalton Calford wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> My name is Dalton Calford and I am one of the founding members of the Interbase
> Developers Initiative.
> 
> With the current upheavels at Inprise in regards to Interbase, alot of
> developers are joining us and asking how to help.
> 
> One of the other founding members, Jason Wharton, has asked me to contact you to
> get your opinion on the porting of his code base to Lazarus.  He has a very
> extensive group of components that he releases as binaries to commercial
> entities, and as full source to anybody who asks as long as they pay him his
> fees when they start making money.
> In the past week, in order to become even more friendly to the open source
> movement, he has opening started releasing his code on a "trustware" model.
> 
> He wants to know how/if it is possible to merge his code base into yours while
> still retaining an income from it (he still has a family and mortgage to deal
> with).  In the interbase community, his code base is considered the best for
> database access.
> 
> As to the helping with the lazarus project, I have been directly contacted by 35
> different developers whose code is well known in the Delphi community.  They are
> all offering to help, as long as they are given some guidence as to what needs
> to be addressed.
> 
> So I guess what I am asking for is, can the project be helped by throwing more
> developers at it, and if so, where and who will coordinate it?  

The Lazarus project can certainly be helped by more people, there is still a lot
of work to do. I think that the coordinating persons are generally agreed to be
 Cliff Baseman,
 Michael Hess
and
 Shane Miller.
I think they would be happy to provide the necessary guidelines.

As to the Interbase components, I think that:
1) Integrating it in Lazarus is not really an option, since it is GPL'ed code and
   hence you cannot ask money for it. But the others may disagree on this.
   IMHO the best thing would be simply to make sure that it compiles with Free Pascal,
   and provide it as an extra...
   
2) If the components are non-visible, then they should better be incorporated
   into the lower-level FCL (Free Component Library); the database layer
   (TDataset etc) is implemented in the FCL. If that is the case, I would be
   very willing to help, since I use Interbase a lot for my (payed) work =-)

   Some time ago I made some changes to FreeUDF interbase components so they
   compiled with Free Pascal, I see no reason why it couldn't be done with
   these components as well.

Michael.