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Author Topic: Lazarus for commercial projects  (Read 9330 times)

Anonymous

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Lazarus for commercial projects
« on: January 09, 2006, 01:00:19 pm »
Hello

I have written a demo program in python and showed it to a few clients. They loved it and want me to begin commercial distribution, so I feel that it is time to start developing it seriously. It will need to be cross platform (Win and Apple mainly) without and VM's, it will need to have a RAD tool for my own sanity and it will be very database intensive (I think I will be using ODBC although that is not decided yet) and it will need to be stable - assuming my code is stable of course. Now Lazarus seems to answer all of these for me but is there a real world scenario where it is being used in live commercial apps?

Before I invest I just need to know that it is a robust long term performer.

Thanks

felipemdc

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Re: Lazarus for commercial projects
« Reply #1 on: January 09, 2006, 11:33:04 pm »
Quote
Now Lazarus seems to answer all of these for me but is there a real world scenario where it is being used in live commercial apps?


There is a list of projects using Lazarus here:

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/Projects_using_Lazarus

A sucessfull commercial application is TruckBytes: http://www.truckbites.com/

There is also the Virtual Magnifying Glass http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/ it is not commercial, it is GPL and multiplatform (windows and linux, but PocketPC and Mac OS X will be added), but more then 155.000 downloads surely mean it is stable and people like it =)

Of course, the list does not show all projects using Lazarus, only a few ones. There are more commercial applications developed with Lazarus.

felipemdc

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Lazarus for commercial projects
« Reply #2 on: January 10, 2006, 01:59:55 am »
When you develop with Lazarus you are not locked to it. The same code can compile with both Lazarus and Delphi adding a few IFDEFs, so this is an extra safety that you won't waste time developing here. Support for more technologies like Windows CE, cocoa and OLE is being developed at the moment.

Quote
Before I invest I just need to know that it is a robust long term performer.


The development speed of Lazarus is very fast. If you have problems using it please send questions on this forum or the mailling list.

My experience is that questions are well answered and that bugs found are quickly fixed.

mikiwoz

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Lazarus for commercial projects
« Reply #3 on: January 11, 2006, 07:21:43 pm »
...and you actually don't invest in Laz, by the way. it's OpenSource Freeware afterall, so you don't need to spend loads of money to start working with it.
And one more thing: FPC/Lazarus programs are cross-platform the way I think is much better than what we get with, say, Java - here it's "write once, compile everywhere". Once compiled - the app simply runs, without the need for any Virtual Machines, interpreters or whatever.

cheers
mike

Anonymous

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Lazarus for commercial projects
« Reply #4 on: February 07, 2006, 02:08:54 pm »
Do I need to pay for commercial use ???

felipemdc

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Lazarus for commercial projects
« Reply #5 on: February 07, 2006, 03:07:38 pm »
No, no need to pay for commercial use.

Lazarus can be used for commercial programs.

matthijs

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Lazarus for commercial projects
« Reply #6 on: February 07, 2006, 03:41:50 pm »
Quote from: "mikiwoz"
...and you actually don't invest in Laz, by the way.

This is not true. :) Maybe you do not have to invest money, but you will need to invest time. So maybe you invest money :) since people like to think "time is money".
What's in a sig? Would my posting look less if it didnot have a sig? (Free after William S.) :)

:( Why cannot I upload my own Avatar? :(

mikiwoz

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Lazarus for commercial projects
« Reply #7 on: February 07, 2006, 09:05:08 pm »
oh yeah, right, and training, and facilities, and OSes and... errrm, hold on a sec...

training? well, it works almost exactly as Delphi did. hmmm. no training cost here. unless you're new to programming with *Pascal - then I suppose you'll have to invest lots of money *less* than with Delphi.

facilities? oh, right, the computers. I thought you'd have to have them already if you worked with Delphi. If not, you would have to buy them anyway, now wouldn't you? and consider the fact that you don't need to buy full-blown Soviet Charriot of Fire for WinXP + Delphi, with a rocking gfx card, 512MB Ram just to get the OS working and 3000+ CPU to be able to write anything. After all - you can always use Linux, which should run OK on most computers about 4 times slower than that. And 8x cheaper.

OSes? hmmm... Debian seems to be free... and so is (K)Ubuntu, if you like eye-candy and ease of configuration. Don't worry, you can cross-compile for Windows - I do, works great. (By the way: imagine the faces of your Windows-using clients when you tell them "well, basically, it's been written and compiled on Linux" - priceless...)

OMG! There's more! the same code will usually run on Windows/Linux/MacOS and lot's of other systems. If I were very picky, I'd say that this should cut some huge costs of porting, should you find some clients with other OS than you have. But I'm not.
Oh, and don't let us forget: FPC/Lazarus is open-source. basically, this gives you the possibility to look at the code for suggestions on how to solve some problems or even use this code in your programs. You can even modify Lazarus to fit your needs. Now how much would it cost to have Borland to craft Delphi the way you'd like?..

Be warned, though, that once you start using Laz, there is no escaping - you will start wasting your time on some stupid forums, trying to show people that there are some alternatives to spending thousands of dollars and getting stuck with a single and closed system with no way out. Now *that's* a waste of time, I'd say! ;)

Cheers
mike

 

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