Motivation of OSS contributors (was: OS wars)

[Florian Klämpfl]

Am 31.07.2010 09:12, schrieb Frank Heckenbach:
> 
> One reason why successful free software projects thrive is
> contributions by users. This is true for big projects such as GNU
> and Linux (of the current source code in the GNU project and in
> Linux, RMS and Linus, respectively, have written only a small part)
> or TeX (though TeX itself is mostly Knuth's original code, what made
> it most useful was LaTeX and many 3rd party packages), but also for
> smaller projects, in particular also FPC.
> 
> With GPC this hasn't happened much. Even if working on the GPC
> compiler itself was difficult due to its backend dependency, this
> was no reason to prevent contributions to Pascal units, both the
> units that come with GPC, including most of its runtime system, and
> 3rd party units or applications (e.g. IDEs). But this happened only
> to a small degree. I can only speculate on why, whether it's
> mentality (as expressed in statements such as the above), or that
> everyone is just too busy working on their in-house applications, or
> even the large array of dialects that GPC supports (which are
> normally thought of as an asset, but may have become a problem in
> that they stifle cooperation between users if everybody uses their
> own set of features).

I think you miss one important point here: to contribute to an OSS
project one must be rather idealistic or even religious about it (yes,
this includes me ;)). But in general those people are not only religious
about the license of the software but also in other regards of IT. So
it's quite natural that someone who works on a OSS compiler considers
also the language used to write the compiler as important. This applies
even to the GUI: just look at the MSEGui or fpGUI
(http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/): people are writing complete GUI
libraries in FPC (this goes beyond lazarus which wraps only GTK/win32/qt).