[fpc-pascal] Division by Zero - not raised exception

[Jonas Maebe]

On 18 apr 2006, at 12:49, Sasa Zeman wrote:

> With free and opensource product you made a trade with voluniers  
> and users
> to make a reliable and popular product, based on your own (i.e, FPC  
> team)
> vision and user's requests. I can suggest features which suits to  
> my own
> needs (declared as a  priority to me regarding type of applications I
> create) and see it is suitable to be incorporate as a general  
> benefit. Then
> I would have elements to decide to using it or not. Nothing wrong nor
> insulting I can see. This is obvious and I consider was not needed  
> to be
> explained (obviously wrong assumption).

The problem was when you kept insisting that the compiler wastes  
memory and should be optimized (with a target of 128MB physical  
memory for Lazarus + the compiler), while you (by your own admission)  
have no idea at all about how the compiler is built and also have no  
interest in spending time on learning about that.

This is insulting because it suggests that the people actually  
working on the compiler don't know what they are talking about, since  
you contradict them without even feeling the need of proving your  
point (and in fact ask from the other people to explain/prove to you  
that the compiler is not wasting memory).

> Once agin, I suggest to be precise on main page what you expect  
> from members
> of this mailing list.

We don't expect anything in particular. This list is to ask questions  
about problems you may have with using the compiler.

>>> Or "If you want to work with development code i
>>> think it is better to find out it yourself what is going wrong. " -
>>> especially that bugs in 2.0.2  require using development code...
>>
>> Afaik the main reason you use 2.1.1 is for the internal linker, not
>> because of bugs in 2.0.2. The internal linker is not a bugfix, it's a
>> new feature.
>
> The main reason is #4922, as is mentioned already.

That does not force you to work with experimental features such as  
the undocumented internal linker.

>> Even if we would want to (and we don't, no matter how hard it may be
>> for you to believe that), we could not make FPC suddenly closed
>> source. It contains contributions from tens of people. We would have
>
> It is highly unlikely that any project will stay OpenSource and  
> free of
> charge forever. As example is popular RedHat where worked 100s,  
> maybe 1000s
> of people (volonitiers and contributers). It become commercial  
> since v 8.0.

Everything which was open source/Free Softwar is still open source/ 
Free Software. They cannot change anything about that. They created  
some add-on programs, but the main thing you pay for is commercial  
grade support, not the software.

In that respect, any addition to the compiler has to remain GPL. So  
the only thing which could become closed would be something like a  
new IDE or so. And the only thing we could ask money for is services  
(e.g. prioritization of bug handling or the implementation of new  
features and support).

In fact, anyone could already offer such services now, for free or  
for money, without owing us a dime. And we wouldn't mind at all,  
since it would only help FPC getting better.

> What is achived is commercial OS with minimum developer costs. In  
> short, It
> is business decision non-sence that when commercial oportunity  
> become real,
> simply ignoring it regarding foundation basis license.

Unless you have no interest at all in providing commercial grade  
support, because it's just a hobby and you want to be free regarding  
how much time you spend on it, on what you spend it.

>> to track down and contact every single one of them, and convince all
>> of them to transfer their copyright to us or to sign some contract
>> before we could change the license of the compiler, rtl and pretty
>> much all of the source distributed with FPC.
>
> If  FreePascal founders are registrated as a company, contract  
> would have
> legitimity in the law, otherwise will not.

This is completely separate from the fact that we would have to  
convince all those people to actually sign such a contract.


Jonas