[fpc-pascal] FPC clean room project

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Mon, 2 Jan 2017 05:23:06 +0000 (UTC)
Mr Bee <pak.lebah at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> There's someone accusing that Free Pascal (and some parts of Lazarus) is just a reverse engineering of Delphi.

FPC runs on 80 platforms. Delphi only runs on MS Windows 32/64 and can
cross compile to a few more.
FPC supports Delphi syntax and several more, including two of its own.


> Even he said some codes of FPC/Laz are taken from Delphi (and Kylix).
> This is a serious allegation.

Yes, and the FPC and Lazarus team treat them seriously. 
I don't know of such code, but if you find such code in FPC/Laz please
report it, so it can be removed/replaced.


> I know that isn't true. Or is it? ;)
> Can anybody elaborate on this? I'd like to debunk the allegation but I don't know where to start and the evidence for it.

Ask the accusers what part is taken, then look at the code and the
commit history.

Just for your interest:
FPC/Lazarus is a volunteer project, which get a lot of patches from the
community. Sometimes patches look like (altered) Delphi code and they
get rejected. But nobody is perfect, and so some years ago some
doubtful procedures were found. They had been replaced.

Many such allegations were not about FPC/Laz, but about projects
using FPC/Laz. Some accusers don't know the difference or don't care.


Mattias