[fpc-pascal] fpPDF and support of Latin2 charset

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 22/03/2019 17:04, Martok wrote:
> Especially for tiny teams, the decision of spending 6k€ or hiring a new
> developer to maintain the toolchain is, sadly, a no-brainer.

I developed fpGUI before I started working at that company. Same with
tiOPF, not initially developed by me, but existed loooong before they
used it. The company spent a ton of money chasing Borland's dream...
Choosing Delphi 7, then the promise of cross platform future with CLX,
so they purchased Kylix 3 for all developers. All that expense (products
and coding time) just to find out that it will be killed off. They
discovered Free Pascal and Lazarus with improved cross-platform support,
but Lazarus was to buggy at the time and no possibility of per app
theming (still not possible to this day - even though Delphi has it
since XE2).

Anyway, I proposed fpGUI and demoed it with a prototype application. It
had rough edges because fpGUI was just a hobby of mine at the time. They
saw potential and agreed to use it and I could spend _part_ of my time
improving it for their [product] benefit. The company wins as they get
the flexibility they needed and software that will not be abandoned, and
the open source project wins as it gets some paid development and
improvements with commercial backing and testing.

fpGUI is not an isolated case. I was hired to implement fpPDF and
fpReport among other things. The company benefited as they needed
something that didn't yet exist (PDF and Reporting engine with no GUI
dependencies, implemented in Object Pascal). In return the company
released that code back to the Free Pascal project.

There are 1000's of cases like this in all kinds of open source projects.

Regards,
  Graeme

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/

My public PGP key:  http://tinyurl.com/graeme-pgp