Contests
Application model
1 - What is your Organization's Name?
Free Pascal and Lazarus
2 - What is your Organization's Homepage?
www.freepascal.org
3 - Describe your organization
FPC/Lazarus is the joined effort of two development teams to bring the power of RAD tools using a compiled language to all interesting platforms. Currently we support several architectures (x86, Amd64/x86_64, PowerPC, Sparc and ARM), and several operating systems (Windows, Windows CE, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Mac OS classic, DOS, Win32, OS/2, Netware, MorphOS and others). We, the maintainers of the FreePascal and Lazarus projects would like to apply as a single organization (called FPC/Lazarus) since our projects are very closely related.
FreePascal (http://www.freepascal.org/) develops a free multiplatform Pascal compiler and the runtime environment. The FreePascal project is already a very long-running OSS project, it has been developed in 1993 with a first release in 1996 and since then has evolved in a rather large project, already supporting a lot of platforms on several different processor families.
Lazarus (http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org) has been founded in 1999 with the goal of developing a modern and efficient IDE and a cross-platform GUI toolkit. It provides a modern class library and an IDE for the development of GUI programs, and is compatible with Borland Delphi VCL, which allows complex GUI software created on Delphi to be ported to many platforms using Lazarus.
4 - Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating?
The FreePascal team would like to take this opportunity to extend the compiler and improve its quality even more. A collection of ideas for students working on the FreePascal can be found at http://wiki.freepascal.org/index.php/Open_tasks . Of course we are willing to provide more exact requirements for each particular task if required.
The Lazarus team hopes that this project will allow us to improve our project, add new features, and make it an even better cross-platform development environment. There is a collection of ideas to be implemented here: http://wiki.freepascal.org/Feature_Ideas
7 - What license does your project use?
Both the compiler and IDE are provided under the GPL, while the runtime libraries are provided under the LGPL with the explicit permission for static linking with proprietary software.
8 - URL for your ideas page
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Feature_Ideas
9 - What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
fpc-devel here: http://www.freepascal.org/maillist.var
10 - Where is the main IRC channel for your organization?
- fpc on FreeNode server
About mentors
1 - What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
All the selected individuals have greatly contributed to our projects. For a short example, Peter wrote a new Internal Linker for FPC, Mattias leads the gtk development on Lazarus and Mark the Windows development.
Several of the developers have experience with teaching students or work as professional software engineers, so we think that the mentored students will be able to learn a lot about software development besides the experience they can get when participating the Summer of Code.
About the program:
1 - What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
We hope to have a good enougth selection so that our students won't disappear.
2- What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
All mentors have worked for many years with Free Pascal and/or Lazarus. If, nevertheless, any of them disappear, we have many competent people on our project, and we can nominate a new mentor.
3 - What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
We expect students to interect with the project's community by participating on our mailling list. We hope that the Summer of Code will be a very positive experience for them, which would drive continued participation even after the end of this year's Summer of Code.
4 - What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
We consider that developing relevant software with FPC and Lazarus is the best way to encourage people to stick to the project once Summer of Code ends, because that leads to a natural desire of improving the tools you use, and we will encourage our students to do so.
