So in short I'm always happy to see commercial companies that do support lazarus making announcements in here and Devart does support lazarus (and no linux does not support lazarus, lazarus supports it) I would be even happier if those companies started reporting bugs or patches too, these are signs of a thriving community and are the signs that I am looking forward to seeing in this community too.
I must say I mostly agree with taazz.
The forum posts carry a "substance-factor". The ones with substance have something to do with the project's source code or its documentation and maybe help create actual code.
It can also be a question which is substantial for a person's own project. It gets answered and everybody is happy.
In the past I was angry with some posts with absolutely no substance. For example people who had no intention to contribute anything, wanted to explain how poorly organized the project and its tools are. (yes, I should have used a more polite tone but that is another issue).
Now, this Devart has substance. They have made components that work under Lazarus.
In my mind they have a moral right to advertise their components, even though they "forgot" to mention Lazarus in this post.
And yes, support from commercial companies is very important for an open source project to become successful.
It brings substance for the project itself. The project looks like a serious alternative in the eyes of other people.
There is a huge number of open source projects (millions) but how many are really successful? Few hundreds, a thousand maybe. It is impossible to define which one is successful.
Anyway, the most successful ones are known and used by many people, they have support from commercial companies, and they compete with commercial products eating their market-share (LibreOffice, Gimp, Linux).
There are also some well-known development tools but FPC/Lazarus is not one of them. Almost nobody knows about it, yet the technical quality is competitive with GCC or Eclipse.
I strongly believe the situation will improve in future. Having commercial companies advertising their Lazarus components side by side with Delphi components is already a big step forward.
Regards,
Juha