Hi all,
Well I've read this thread with interest, and now I want to interject.
I learned pascal on my own in primary school. In high school I studied
it much further. Then I entered university and it was all java (which I
grew to hate).
I began to work professionally, and learned many languages, I actually
maintained some fpc projects right in the beginning - one of which was
direqcafe - despite my job being in other languages, I loved pascal as
an old friend and having fpc let me contribute to and learn linux
development when nobody had heard of it with a much reduced learning
curve - because I knew the language inside out from (by then) over 10
years experience.
Later on, lazarus matured to the point where I rewrote direqcafe in it
as a graphical app - and it was amazing.
I have never even USED delphi - I was a poor coder in a poor country and
lazarus let me learn OP and graphical programming on my own time with
zero budget !
So I got better and better, and now there are some components included
in lazarus which I wrote and some I helped others to write.
Last year, I quit my job and founded a small development company called
outkast solutions. My first (open source) project was outkafe - a newly
redone direqcafe - a project that now has well over 10 thousand sites
using it world wide - most of them in poor countries.
If you go to a cybercafe in brazil there's a good chance it's using
outkafe to manage them (I know of at least 5 in Sao Paulo and that's
just the ones who mailed me to thank me - who knows how many others).
I make my money by doing customized versions for customers, if they pay
extra I give them the copyright to their version to license as they see
fit.
My biggest customization project just signed a deal which will see over
1000 cybercafe's built in the DRC using a derivative of outkafe with
some extra features.
In other words:
I run a highly successful business (profitable in it's first year -
almost unheard of) using lazarus, in fact, using EXCLUSIVELY free (as in
speech AND beer) software !
I could never have done this if my overheads included thousands of USD
(at 6 times the price + distance cost = about 10 times the price) in
license fees.
And the software I run my business on are not poor second rate stuff.
Quasar accounting is absolutely perfect, even me who only has 8th grade
accounting can keep my books up to legal requirements with hardly any
effort, and lazarus lets me develop stable usable software that people
are using.
Lazarus is not a poor second cousin to delphi. It's the future of object
pascal and it's abilities hugely exceed what you need to do successful,
profitable development work. Yes there are features I would like to see
- when I identify them, I try to help add them - I can actually DO that!
In fact, I would say delphi could never have worked in my field because
I consider THAT the killer feature. Whatever delphi cannot do - and that
cannot be handled by a component - a delphi developer cannot do.
In lazarus - if I need it, I add it.
The closest thing to a grip I can have with lazarus if that it develops
SO fast, that I am actually struggling to keep up to date with new
features, I haven't even had a chance to study the new localization
system yet so I can stop using the old one which is in outkafe. This is
definitely much better than the alternative - developing so slow that
people start to wonder if you ARE developing.
I don't want to flame delphi, I want to state to all who flame lazarus
that frankly lazarus puts bread on my plate, and delphi could not have -
for several reasons, of which the most critical to me is that I can
actually add the features I need to lazarus myself if they aren't there.
I am actually fairly dogmatic about free software (in the FSF sense) -
but I couldn't have afforded to BE that way if it could not do what my
business requires - lazarus in particular provides the key single
product my business relies on.
Ciao
A.J.
--
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -
Clarke's law
"Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is insufficiently
advanced" -Gehm's corollary
"Any technologist that is distinguishable from a magician is
insufficiently advanced" - My corollary
The worlds worst webcomic: http://silentcoder.co.za/scartoonz
The worlds best cybercafe manager: http://outkafe.outkastsolutions.co.za
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fn:AJ Venter
n:Venter;AJ
org:Global Pact Trading Pty. Ltd.;OutKast Solutions
email;internet:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
title:Director of Product Development
tel;work:+27 21 554 5059
tel;fax:+27 11 252 9197
tel;cell:+27 83 455 9978
url:http://www.outkastsolutions.co.za
version:2.1
end:vcard
