uEControls

[Graeme]

Is there any links or pages explaining how to write good and more organized controls? I'm a self-taught programmer and I do not follow any good coding standard, but I want to learn to be better.

You learn it with experience and lots of reading. Reading some books or internet articles on Design Patterns is a very good starting point. Here are some I wrote for a programming magazine a couple years ago. http://geldenhuys.co.uk/articles/
 Books on Enterprise Software Engineering or Refactoring is also good.

[taazz]

I'm against about properties my self too. I remove them on all the components I use in my applications. Although minimal the about properties are nothing more than trash eating memory away. One control is not a problem usually all of them is.

The "user" of a set of components is the developer that uses the component to build his application. In Lazarus when you right click the icon of a component you can choose open the unit, and the developer can view immediately the origin and author of this component. In typhon (a copy of Lazarus) when you choose to open the unit, you see the wrapper imposed by pitotlogic, any notice about the real author is not shown until you go more deeper. That is why we put the about property,  and in the case of our components it not really a overload. Of course all have the possibility of use a better made set of components without the about property and avoid it. But if someone want to use our work must respect that we written in our copyright notice.

No I don't have to respect the about property nor leave it  in my internal development. I even remove all the license nonsense from the units I use to an external file usually with the same name as the unit and the extension .lic. I do not have a problem with small license text on top of the unit but I will not accept nor allow multi page text of license or history of changes before I'm able to see any code. First and for most is my comfort when coding I really am not going to pay the price of codetyphon's misbehavior and you have no right to ask me to.

PS. I haven't used your components so far and after this conversation I doubt that I will ever use or recommend them. None the less they are good looking components I expect the same quality on the code too I fill like I lost something good today, keep up the good work.

[Graeme]

I do not have a problem with small license text on top of the unit but I will not accept nor allow multi page text of license or history of changes before I'm able to see any code.

I'm exactly the same. A max of 5-8 lines for licensing or copyright. History of changes - that belongs in the code repository, and can be queried a lot more accurately there.

I'm at the point, in fpGUI Toolkit, where I don't even see the need for the AUTHORS.txt file - I can't keep maintaining that, because I get a lot of contributions. Plus, Git (unlike SVN or CVS) keeps that information for me already. Git also differentiates between the Author and Commiter. So if anybody wants to see a list of authors, just ask Git to return a list for you.

[M.A.R.C.]

Maybe this can be useful to others developers:

In the lazarus Wiki: http://wiki.freepascal.org/Adding_an_About_dialog_as_a_property_to_a_custom_component

You can find how to adding an About dialog as a property to a custom component only visible to the developer of the application at design time. 

Regards.

[taazz]

Maybe this can be useful to others developers:

Not really you took a simple annoyance of including a static string with a version info in your application and added not one but two dialogs that my application has no use for including the text of what ever license the component developer thought is fair use. guess what queue that component ended up.

[JuhaManninen]

Adding an About property is OK but removing it is equally OK.
This is not even on grey area as I wrote earlier. PilotLogic had all rights to remove your property. Complaining about it was yet another false accusation against them.
You copied the same complaint to many forum threads here, clearly trying to trigger another flame war against CodeTyphon and PilotLogic.

However it seems they violate your Mozilla license by not providing "a file documenting the changes You made to create that Covered Code and the date of any change".
Mozilla license sucks IMO. Why they make such a demand which only restricts freedom? Freedom after all is the main theme of open source.

@mrisco, would you please consider changing your license to LGPL? Then it would match the license of LCL and many other packages/components.

Adding the About property into your component emphasizes that YOU made it. Why do you want to have it there? Why is a text file not enough? Complaining when somebody removed it raises more questions.
There may be better ways to boost your ego than open source development.

Looking at a bigger picture, open source and its licenses are very new. For example GPL promises so much freedom and is so idealistic that it scares me. All good idealistic doctrines in history have turned into something else, typically to the very opposite of the original idea.
It can be already seen here. When somebody actually uses the freedom promised by GPL, he is called "immoral" or "behaving bad". Whatever excuse is used to attack him. Why this reminds me of how religions have been used as an excuse to attack other people again and again during milleniums?

GPL is so new that even its original creators are still around. I believe Free Software Foundation will quide its usage in near future. Later, maybe after hundreds of years things change. GPL will have amendments that turn its meaning around or something similar. The fundamental problem is the evil nature of human beings, desire to control other people and take away their freedom. GPL will not be an exception among idealistic doctrines.
But, we don't need to worry about that. We can concentrate on present time.

The freedom provided by GPL is no joke. Many details are explained here:
 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html
It allows for example:
- A big company can modify GPL code as much as it wants and use it internally without giving the source code to anybody.
- A person can modify GPL code and ask a million dollar price for it. Nobody will buy it and it remains in his personal use which is allowed anyway.
- A person can modify GPL code and sell binaries compiled from it without including sources or even providing a download link for them. Sources must be provided when a customer requests them explicitly.

I try to prevent this Lazarus project being used as an instrument for turning GPL ideas upside-down.
I am also planning to mention the well known hate-blog to Free Software Foundation because it spreads thick lies about GPL. Why can it continue doing so without any penalty? It clearly has worked as an inspiration for hate posts here.
Hating something always attracts followers. It is quite horrible.