[Lazarus] Lazarus and Free Pascal downloads plummeting on SourceForge

[dimitris chloupis]

Its hard to interpret download numbers anyway. Its like youtube , you watch a video because it has a million of views , to later find out that it had nothing to really offer to you and living you perplexed why so many people even bothered to watch it. I think the questions should be not how many people download lazarus , but how many people actually use it . And also how many people who would love to use lazarus don't even aware that lazarus exists. 

Lazarus has reached a level of maturity I think that is time to start being promoted outside Delphi ranks. I am very new with lazarus I started using the laste few days, and I come from python though I used to be a Delphi user 15 years ago, but I certainly think that Lazarus and Free Pascal deserve a lot more glory than they are getting. I did not use it all along because from the website did not look to me like a serious product and it was not clear even from using it how mature really is. There was not that thing to keep me motivated to use it. I came back to it out of my frustration of not being able to find an IDE on par with Delphi. And I am now hapily discover that is all I wanted all along.  

I will try to do my part in promoting Lazarus. Maybe even help improving the look of the wiki a bit. I already have in mind a few ways to make lazarus very tempting to non pascal coders and especially python coders like me. Keep up the amazing work people. 


________________________________
 From: Graeme Geldenhuys <graemeg.lists at gmail.com>
To: Lazarus mailing list <lazarus at lists.lazarus.freepascal.org> 
Sent: Friday, 3 August 2012, 11:28
Subject: Re: [Lazarus] Lazarus and Free Pascal downloads plummeting on SourceForge
 
Hi Everybody,

Lets just face the facts.... Such download statics are just "eye
candy" for SourceForge. There is no way you can take those as a
reliable source of information. It's like Microsoft trying to compare
Windows installs (actually copies shipped to OEM's) to Linux Install.
Nobody counts torrent downloads of Linux, nobody counts the multiple
of CD's I created and shared with my friends, nobody counted the
multiple times I installed a CD even though I only downloaded it once,
etc...

The same applies to FPC and Lazarus projects. You can install from
multiple locations: application repositories of Linux distros,
official downloaded archives, unofficial daily build archive, direct
checkouts from the repository, the fact that linux downloads tend to
be lots of little archives and the Windows version one big archive etc
etc.

So there you have it - those "statistics" are useless!!!


-- 
Regards,
  - Graeme -


_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net

--
_______________________________________________
Lazarus mailing list
Lazarus at lists.lazarus.freepascal.org
http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lazarus-ide.org/pipermail/lazarus/attachments/20120803/b045918d/attachment-0003.html>