> If FreePascal founders are registrated as a company, contract would have > legitimity in the law, otherwise will not.
Incorporating into a registered company doesn't really help secure anything down - for example Borland could cut off the Delphi product at any time (or sell it) even though they are a "legal" company. Companies spend more time yapping about their shareholders and what would be best for the shareholders instead of what would be best for the developers (read the Borland news groups - everyone always comes up with the excuse that "but what the developer wants isn't always good for our shareholders". Even though developers are buying the software and supporting the figurehead shareholders. Doesn't make sense to me.). Or maybe you mean a foundation, like a non-profit organization? Obviously FPC is not out for profit, but out to help the developer. So I can see a non-profit organization working - but this would mean that FPC team would spend more time on things like Accounting, Lawyers, etc. Look how free software foundation is spending time hiring lawyers and etc. for their foundation. Although I do agree that freepascal should not just be a hobby for all, and some of us should start using it within their jobs to make it a better compiler. I'm sure lots of people rely on GCC and PHP at their jobs every day - and this helps make it better because it must be high quality at work, higher quality than just hobby. I use FPC for some of my work (websites, misc tools), but not experienced enough to be a development team member yet. I'm guessing there are a few others that use FPC in their real jobs. If you can't find jobs out there that use Pascal then you have to be really brave and start your own business and start hiring people with Pascal skills. Someone has to do the work. Or use FPC internally in your home/small business yourself without worrying about the current work available. How to balance a clash of free vs open vs closed vs commercial? Some people could care less about source code (customer at home who has never programmed in his life, looking for a paint program on download.com, let's say). So sell software to those folks who don't need the sources. But keep some software open, such as the compiler and RTL - because in this case developers do care about the sources and fixes are easiler to apply with them. _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
