Best news I heard for a long time. 3.0 is almost groundbreaking especially for those designing distributed but lightweight architectures just to mention one advantage among many you get.
You get to know another paradigm which is very important. Object orientation already evolved into an ideology. So it's very good to get to know something so totally different.
For us who use stuff on a regular basis the changes seem small but peu a peu these add up.
Once an electrician still developing in spare time who know Turbo Pascal 5 from school while servicing the air conditioner saw me programming. When he heard that I would use Pascal he looked at my screen jumped from the ladder and left the office together with me after midnight.
Freepascal is indeed a very solid approach I use on Linux especially. Works great on Windows too.
In the end there are 3 tribes. freepascal, Delphi and the Elements Compiler (C#, Swift, Oxygene Language is Pascal).
There are many more traditional Pascal environments too. Smartmobile (HTML 5 apps), XEROCODER (based on FPC) for Grid developments and an integration into Visual Studio Code ...
FPC Version 3 is a huge step and a great one. While I personally admire all of the people's work I must confess the evolution of freepascal as well as the Lazarus IDE is exceptional.
Decisions by companies listed at the stock exchange have to be seen from that perspective. Software business is an asset business. Software licences are not apples. For some strange reasons some analysts do believe that a certain kind of asset is more profitable - selling licences lead to a higher turnover. That's how software is seen from the investor's perspective.
Software is craftsmanship + plus 'copy' from the distribution perspective.
That's why open source really provides good results. Open source is free because there is no barter involved. There is no real declining marginal utility. Every technology that was in the position to grow a reputation busts exactly the moment the last user installed a copy ...
The marginal utility has to be introduced by design :). Then you get money ... because you have a price.