Bill,

An accurate assessment :-) Just wanting to be pedantic, I would like to
clarify a couple of points...

> InterBase is open-source now, with a tiny fraction of its once strong
> revenue. We can assume that Inprise doesn't want to pay for licensing
> MERANT ODBC. They'll be happy to let an independent value-add company
> bear that cost--or else develop and support a new driver, which will be
> just as expensive, ultimately.

They did pay, the $100k bill for maintenance / deployment of the existing
5.6 driver was paid
by Inprise on the 7th July 2000... so effectively they can continue to ship
that driver until Feb 2001.

> One other thing that Inprise has up their sleeve: since they acquired
> Visigenic, I assume they now own the rights to the old ODBC 2.5 driver
> that shipped with IB 4.2 and 5.0. If Inprise wanted to invest any
> effort in InterBase, they could bring that code up to the latest
> Microsoft ODBC standard, and sell it as an add-on to InterBase 6.0. A
> bargain at $299 per seat! :-P

They don't have the code, if I remember rightly Visigenic before being
acquired by Borland/Inprise "sold" their ODBC business to InterSolv. Trust
me, I went looking for it :-)

Regards
Paul