No I am not displeased. Competition is good. If Lazarus was as badly organized as you keep repeating, then it would die, but I don't see it happening now.
Mostly I am surprised because from CodeTyphon's point of view it just makes no sense to fork the Lazarus core IDE.
If I was the person making decisions there, I would try to improve Lazarus through patches and then becoming developer with commit rights, at the same time benefiting from all the other contributions. That is a normal procedure between many other OSS projects and commercial companies.
But no, they did not want to try that.
It is simply matter of opinion and chosen strategy. They evaluate situation and they choose own strategy. They know their reasons. You can ask them. Do not contribute back is not necessary evil. Evil could be some kind of attacking developers, servers, trademark, ...
BTW, for multiple Lazarus installations the --pcp parameter was suggested. What was wrong with it?
I used this parameter as well but it is simply not intuitive. It is technical and allow config directory change but you have to learn it by yourself, dig deep in documentation. If someone says that it cannot be done better then I simply not agree. If it would be ok, then there is no need for other starting scripts and managers.
For example why Lazarus have startlazarus additional application? If you need to recompile and restart lazarus you can simply exit application and start it manually again. Yet automatic restart is more convenient.
Another example, If you start lazarus and it doesn't find needed files it show configuration dialog. It is definitely useful and more user friendly than fixing directories in config files directly.
So be able to maintain simply multiple lazarus installations make good sense for me.
How does it prove "lack of coordination and leadership" for you?
You can judge project from many different perspectives. Book linked by you was mentioning some pitfalls which could arise during project existence.
* support for legacy technologies
* support for current technologies
* support for future technologies
* leadership, coordination
* community support
* usability, look and feel
* previous, current and future estimated project activity
* new contributor engagement, promotion, community size change
and more...
You can mark each item from 1 to 10.
Current status is simple. Lazarus and FPC are project of type, where some volunteers who have some interest in project contribute to project especially to part which is interest for them. They don't care about other parts and any promotion. Some people manage some servers so they can give commit access other write access so it can be called as lowest leadership form. But to judge particular project you have to compare it to other existed. You can compare to small projects and to huge projects. To projects which already show that something is possible and can be done. Did I mentioned LibreOffice and OpenDocument foundation? You want to object that it is secured by huge financial capital? And what about charts of ever increasing number of comiters?
So lack of leadership is related mainly that there are not set priority according what is needed in general by users but for what contributors have time and motivation. It is perfectly understandable but if somebody talk about growing of community then there are many reasons that community cannot grow significantly. It is clear that most of people who came here just used Turbo Pascal, Delphi or other pascal compiler.
This is for longer discussion which ends with something like, people doesn't have time and money and nothing can be done about it.
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