Contests

Application models

Free Pascal and Lazarus (2008)

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 provide a compiler, class libraries and an IDE to allow the development of Pascal programs on 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 32 and 64 bit professional 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) is both the class libraries for Free Pascal that emulates Delphi and a modern and efficient IDE. Lazarus and Free Pascal strive for the write once compile anywhere philosophy. Since the exact same compiler and class library are available on several platforms, no recoding is necessary to produce identical products for them.

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, Florian is started the Free Pascal compiler, Paul greatly improved several areas of our gui library and Almindor works on the FreeBSD port.

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.

2 - Who will your mentors be? Please enter their Google Account address separated by commas. If your organization is accepted we will email each mentor to invite them to take part. (optional)

almindor at gmail.com, paul.ishenin at gmail.com, florian.klaempfl at gmail.com

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 interact 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.

Virtual Magnifying Glass (2008)

1 - What is your Organization's Name?

Virtual Magnifying Glass

2 - What is your Organization's Homepage?

http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/

3 - Describe your organization

Virtual Magnifying Glass is designed for visually-impaired and others who need to magnify a part of the screen. Unlike most similar programs it does not open a separate window for the magnification but instead puts a movable magnifying glass on screen.

With more then 100.000 downloads per year, the Virtual Magnifying Glass is a widely used software which greatly helps visually-impaired and others to use the computer.

4 - Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating?

We have a mission of offering the best magnification tool possible for everyone, but some difficulties like the lack of hardware and developers is holding the progress of the some features like the Dynamic Mode. So we decided to apply to participate in Google Summer of Code in the hope of gaining the necessary resources to improve this software even further.

7 - What license does your project use?

GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991

8 - URL for your ideas page

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=60638&atid=494774

9 - What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

We don't use a mailling list, but rather a forum: http://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=60638

10 - Where is the main IRC channel for your organization?

We don't use IRC.

About mentors

1 - What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

All selected individuals have greatly contribute for the Virtual Magnifying Glass in the past.

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?

3 - What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

4 - What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

External Links

• Google Summer of Code 2008
• Google Summer of Code - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)