On 13 May 2001, at 15:14, Jim Starkey wrote:

> There is one and only one way to compete with Borland and that is
> to offer a better product at a better price.

I don't like the word "competition", it's very business oriented and
it's too "artificial" to my taste :) But in a nutshell you're right, of
course. And when we're just talking about "business competition", I
think that FB should have some "extension points" in the code,
that will allow proprietary extensions that fall outside the IPL'ed
code. I'll try to put what I mean in more clear way.

Imagine that some corporation would like to incorporate a full-text
search functionality into core engine (and sell that tailored version,
of course). IFAK all major full-text search engines are proprietary
and thus could not be directly incorporated into IPL'ed files. This
corporation would have to modify some FB source files that that
calls are made to external, non IPL'ed files. It would be nice, if FB
would be prepared for such "extensions" in key modules. This
should forestall forking in FB codebase and attract third-party
vendors to make such tailored versions (and pour money into core
engine development, although indirectly).

I'd like know what parts of FB engine would be potentially
interesting from this point of view, and how to adapt them to "plug-
in" awareness in best way. Well, I'm really brain-dead about this. I
can barely read C code and I didn't study the FB code in deep, so
forgive me if the answer could be easily get from simple FB code
lookup.

Best regards
Pavel Cisar
Czech Republic, A country with world's best ice hockey team
(2001)