[Lazarus] Release 1.0, part 2

[Tom Lisjac]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 4:30 AM, Vincent Snijders
<vsnijders at vodafonevast.nl> wrote:

> Help me, please.
>
> What is the purpose of a creating a 1.0 release:
> A. Marketing, getting more people of the threshold to use Lazarus
> or
> B. Forcing Lazarus developers to keep stable interfaces

B makes A possible.

There is no point to releasing a 1.0 for publicity reasons if the
publicity is going to end up being bad due to instability and code
breakage. That would only make Lazarus/FPC a well publicized failure.
Given that choice, I'd rather see the project continue to plod along
in the obscure beta niche that it occupies now.

1.0 in a development tool means a production stable platform for
application builders... B. If the 1.0 you release meets that
requirement, you will have A... and probably fairly quickly. Delphi
grew rapidly in the late 90's because developers liked RAD and felt
confident that the tool was solid and their sources would continue to
compile as they upgraded it. The company also didn't refer to it's
customers as "users". They valued their developer base and a team was
created to maintain the confidence and enthusiasm that the initial
quality of the product inspired. When that relationship eventually
faultered, so did the product and the company.

After 10 years of development, this project should have some of that
same confidence and enthusiasm in it's developer base.  At this point
there's lots of enthusiasm and a production stable 1.0 would start
building confidence. If there's no commitment to that goal, please
don't release a 1.0, keep plodding along with the betas, have fun and
don't worry about breaking "user" generated code that will frustrate
anyone who tries to pick up and do anything serious with this
toolchain. Next year we can always revisit this topic and see how well
that strategy has worked by counting all the new Lazarus projects and
apps along with the number of developers that have joined the
project... or left it.

Thanks,

-Tom