On Sat, 31 Jul 2010, Florian Klämpfl wrote:
Am 31.07.2010 09:12, schrieb Frank Heckenbach:
One reason why successful free software projects thrive is contributions by users. This is true for big projects such as GNU and Linux (of the current source code in the GNU project and in Linux, RMS and Linus, respectively, have written only a small part) or TeX (though TeX itself is mostly Knuth's original code, what made it most useful was LaTeX and many 3rd party packages), but also for smaller projects, in particular also FPC.
With GPC this hasn't happened much. 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).
I think you miss one important point here: to contribute to an OSS project one must be rather idealistic or even religious about it (yes, this includes me ;)). But in general those people are not only religious about the license of the software but also in other regards of IT. So it's quite natural that someone who works on a OSS compiler considers also the language used to write the compiler as important. This applies even to the GUI: just look at the MSEGui or fpGUI (http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/): people are writing complete GUI libraries in FPC (this goes beyond lazarus which wraps only GTK/win32/qt).
I think there are a variety of reasons why people contribute to free software, including the failure of the market to provide software that people want at prices they are willing to pay. If, for example, you want a Pascal compiler for your favorite computing platform and the major suspects don't think they can make a profit providing it, you might well think it worth your while to devote 2-4 hours a week developing or improving a free one, rather than have to switch languages or platforms (of course, you know this). I daresay the availability of free software has been a large part of the reason why OS/2 (as ECS) still survives a decade after IBM stopped supporting it. Idealism has inspired a lot of free software, but it's not the only motivation for contributing.
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