Comment 23 for bug 275688

First, FPC is perfectly usable by itself and comes with an IDE.

Second Lazarus is an advanced IDE to generate programs. While Lazarus itself is GPL, the programs that it generates are not subject to the GPL, but to LGPL with modifications, as the normal FPC license. So there people could surely get hurt with this. Specially since a lot of users on Linux are ex-Kylixers with their commercial packages.

But the main point is that due to a copyright issue that was brought to our attention by Borland/Codegear, we rewrote significant parts of the RTL, and agreed with Borland to take the old , encumbered parts down. Codegear was all friendly but firm about it, and we wanted to respond similarly.

It is then frustrating to see releases done with the encumbered code almost two and an half months (August 11th) after this release, while we retracted all these versions on August 11th.

And yes, mea culpa. I should have started kicking people earlier, maybe mail legal at canonical since package maintainers might not always read release manifests, release comments on the site and in general not have an idea on what goes on.

On the other hand, the release manifest does mention a copyright dispute, and with whom, and is quoted in the post of 30-09. Moreover, the GPL escape is not mentioned till now by me (since not publically know). So to be honest I'm a bit surprised, how lax the distributions react to copyright disputes clearly annotated and known.