[fpc-devel] Google summer of code

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

Ok, I did some small modifications, and I guess we can call this a
release candidate. If one says it´s ok, I will send it:

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Dear Sir or Madam,

With this email we would like to apply as mentoring organization for
your "Summer of Code" program. We hope that with your funding we can
improve the project.

FPC/Lazarus is the joined effort of two development teams to bring the
power of RAD tools using a compiled language to 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 free multiplatform
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 (http://tinyurl.com/edolq) and since then
has evolved in a rather large project, already supporting a lot of
platforms on several different processor families. 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.

Lazarus (http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org) has been founded in 1999
with the goal of developing a RAD IDE based on FPC. It provides a
modern class library and an IDE for the development of GUI programs,
and is compatible with Borland Delphi VCL, which allows complex GUI
software created on Delphi to be ported to many platforms using
Lazarus. We hope 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

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.

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.

We applied last year to participate on summer of code.

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho will be the organization administrator.
He's e-mail is felipemonteiro.carvalho at gmail

Our mailling lists can be found at:
http://www.freepascal.org/maillist.var
and
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=StaticPage&file=index&sURL=maill

Our main IRC channels are #fpc and #lazarus-ide , both on FreeNode server.

Florian Klaempfl will be the backup administrator

The mentors will be: Mattias Gaertner, Daniel Mantione, Peter Vreman,
Mark Weustink, Florian Klaempfl and Vincent Snijders

All the selected individuals have greatly contributed to our projects.
For a short example, Peter wrote a new Internal Linker for FPC,
Mattias leads the gtk development on Lazarus and Mark the Windows
development.

We hope to have a good enougth selection so that our students won't disappear.

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.

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.

Best regards,

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho in behalf of the FPC/Lazarus development teams

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PS: Sorry for nominating people as backup admins or mentors without
asking, but we have very little time. My idea is that if our proposal
is accepted, we can change the mentors.