On Sat, 2010-07-31 at 09:12 +0200, Frank Heckenbach wrote: [...]
Even if working on the GPC compiler itself was difficult due to its backend dependency, this was no reason to prevent contributions to Pascal units, both the units that come with GPC, including most of its runtime system, and 3rd party units or applications (e.g. IDEs). But this happened only to a small degree. I can only speculate on why, whether it's mentality (as expressed in statements such as the above), or that everyone is just too busy working on their in-house applications, or even the large array of dialects that GPC supports (which are normally thought of as an asset, but may have become a problem in that they stifle cooperation between users if everybody uses their own set of features).
Even if people are very busy with their own applications, they must be developing libraries of frequently-used routines, which would be of great benefit to the development community (I'm not talking here about proprietary code written for one's employers - I'm talking about one's own personal development efforts).
It may be that (as Florian Klämpfl said), not everyone is "religious" enough about the ideals of free software to want to contribute their own source code or their own time. Or it may be that it simply doesn't occur to people that the results of their own development efforts may actually be useful to others (or some may not be very confident about their own code (never stopped me! :-))). I would imagine (or at least hope) that it is not a result of selfishness (i.e., takers, not givers). I suspect that most users of GNU software are altruistic enough.
I generally try to make available to others units (with sources) that I have benefited from (either by converting/modifying existing public domain/free sources, or by writing from the scratch myself) because I assume (perhaps conceitedly) that, if I needed that code, then there must be someone else out there that would also need it. The problem is that, in such cases (especially with units) you never quite know whether anyone is actually using them - which can be a disincentive to continued development.
Conclusion: whether or not the project to renew GPC takes off, all programmers have piles and piles of routines for all sorts of things, that would be useful to others, and that could save someone weeks (or even months) of development effort. Perhaps we should all try to contribute our source code to a library bank?