History

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The Lazarus project has its roots in Megido. From Google Groups and other mailing lists we can reconstruct that Megido was a project that attempted to make an open source clone of Delphi, starting with the source code to Sybil, which in turn was a clone of Delphi for OS/2, but its designer was more constrained. Megido started in 1998, but died somewhere in 1999, due to lack of focus, and lack of interest for a Sybil based clone with its restrictions.

So, Lazarus was started in February of 1999. It was primarily founded by three individuals: Cliff Baeseman, Shane Miller, and Michael A. Hess. Of the three founders, only Michael A. Hess is still involved with the project.

All three had attempted to get involved with the Megido project which dissolved. In frustration they started their own, the Lazarus project.

The next oldest member of the team is Marc Weustink. He got involved with the project in Aug. 1999. Marc was looking for a Delphi on Linux solution (as there was none at the time from Borland), and was also interested in Linux in general, therefore joining the Lazarus project. At the time Marc joined, Lazarus was not much more than an empty toolbar and some hardcoded gtk menu items. The editor was still being discussed. Marc is still a core contributor, with the debugger interface being his pet subproject. (TODO: more?)

Following him is Mattias Gaertner who got involved in Sept. 2000. With Mattias on board of the team the project made a huge step forward. Mattias ported synedit, and coded large pieces of the codetools and the designer.

With these additions, Lazarus started to get its face. Three years later he added the package system and many other IDE features.

Micha Nelissen started contributing in June 2003, mainly sending patches for the win32 interface. He used Borland C++ Builder, but wanted to look into more platforms as well. Due to Borland adding their own proprietary extensions to C++ to support their VCL, the odds of BCB applications to ever going to be portable were slim. A change of language was not really a problem so after some looking around, he thought Lazarus seemed most promising. At that time Lazarus was based on gtk for both win32 and linux. On Linux it worked very well, but on win32 it was buggy. Users of Lazarus asked more and more for a native win32 interface and Micha jumped in to help writing a native win32 interface.

Vincent Snijders was given a link to Lazarus and FPC during the summer of 1999, when he had just bought his linux computer and started his thesis, which involved mathematical simulations written in Delphi. He followed the project and tried mainly to get Lazarus running on Windows. After graduation in 2003 he got more time for Lazarus and started to contribute patches for Lazarus. His main focus is getting Lazarus on Windows as good as on Linux and the Lazarus snapshots.

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho started looking at Lazarus in 2005 when it was still in the version 0.9.6. Felipe expected to use it as a substitute for Delphi, specially in Linux. Some initial attempts to use it faced a number of problems, but he didn't give up working with it, as he saw a huge potential in it, and decided to keep working on it, with the goal of having it a fully functional cross-platform alternative to Delphi for his projects (what he believes was already achieved). The contribution was initially only reporting bugs and writing documentation, but eventually went into coding as well. During this time he started many new interfaces, including Qt 4, WinCE, fpGUI and Cocoa. His current focus is the TTrayIcon component, the PasCocoa bindings, the Windows CE Interface, writing articles for the Toolbox Magazine and writing the Lazarus Book.

Paul Ishenin has noticed Lazarus while working on FastCube 1.0 in Jan 2007. He decided that it would be nice to port FastCube to FPC and Lazarus and made his first trial. The process was rather easy but few things did not work - like the custom drag/drop cursor. At that moment Lazarus cursors implementation was very incomplete. Paul has started the research of what and how to implement them at least for Windows platform. He has found an IRC channel with few Lazarus developers and started to send patches to Marc Weustink. To Paul's surprise Marc Weustink did not accept the first patch as is because it did not pay an attention to code split between LCL and widgetsets. After Paul had implemented cursors for gtk, gtk2 and carbon and made a few more patches he was granted a write access to svn. Later Paul participated in gtk2, qt and win32 widgetsets development and IDE. His main focus is to fix remaining win32 LCL bugs.

Martin Friebe ToDo...

Juha Manninen joined in 2009 by first fixing bugs and then starting to maintain the Delphi converter. After improving the converter he moved to other areas, mostly fixing bugs and improving the IDE.

[todo: others]