[Lazarus] Is Lazarus project in a downward spiral?

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Fri, 5 Mar 2010, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

> Hi,
>
> [...If you are easily offended to what I normally write, stop reading now...]
>
>
> This is a continuation of my issues regarding the tab-type components.
> Lazarus team doesn't have enough manpower or resources to maintain
> duplicate components, chase a moving target which has dedicated
> developers and corporate money backing (Delphi), and still implement
> it's own unique features and be a competitive product (or a project
> Delphi developers would want to switch too).
>
> This worrying issues is more visible lately than ever before. I'm
> starting to worry that Lazarus team is trying so hard to catch a
> moving target (delphi) and trying to implement many fancy features,
> that nothing actually ends up becoming stable or compatible for long.
> The old English saying holds true here: "Jack of all trades, but
> master of none". Look how long GTK1 took to become stable, and just
> when it did, Lazarus switched to LCL-GTK2, which is still marked as
> beta quality, has slower performance than GTK1 - so here we start all
> over again. Not to mention that GTK1 is now often broken too, so we
> can't even switch back if we wanted too. :-(
>
> I have also been seeing more and more developers complaining that
> their patches are not even being looked at - the core team seem to be
> preoccupied with other stuff. Yes I know we are all busy and have REAL
> jobs, but then give more developers write access and delicate work to
> those developers. The "fixes" branch has been totally unusable for
> months because the form designer is broken (you cannot move/resize
> components) and nothing is being done regarding that - even though it
> has been reported numerous times. Then there is the common known fact
> that if you port a component or implement your own component, it's
> guaranteed to not work or compile one or two Lazarus "minor.minor"
> versions later (I explicitly mention minor.minor because Lazarus
> doesn't increase major or minor versions - not it my lifetime at
> least). So this means developers (which are also busy) must keep
> fixing old/existing work.
>
> Then developers like myself, which try and promote FPC and Lazarus IDE
> in the corporate environment, hoping to catch a break and get some
> corporate sponsorship for Lazarus, is having an endless battle.

Nevertheless, there are plans to start commercial support for Lazarus.

The people who are currently playing with this idea will announce 
this when the time is right for them, but I mention this now so
that you can see that Lazarus is taken serious, and that corporate
sponsorship is not an illusion.

I myself have recently also contracted development for Lazarus/FPC. 
I would not do this if I didn't consider Lazarus a viable option.

Michael.