ANN: "The FirebirdSQL Foundation"


We are very pleased to announce the formation of "The FirebirdSQL
Foundation", a non-profit association with the objectives of supporting
and advancing the development of the open source FirebirdSQL relational
database engine.

Since the Firebird project's inception in July-2000, the possibility of
setting up a non-profit organisation for raising and channelling funds
has been discussed.

In late June 2002, a number of us started to pursue this option
seriously. The legal formalities for setting up a non-profit
association have taken several months, a process that resulted in our
'steering group' establishing the aims and rules for the new Foundation.
During this time the steering group members have also pursued the
objectives of the Foundation on an informal basis.

Progress so far has been good. The basis of the Foundation involves
raising funds from membership dues ($300USD per year) and other
activities, and directing them toward funding development. With an
initial group of some 15 people and advice from various other members of
the Firebird community, the FirebirdSQL Foundation has over the last
four months, been able to provide a grant, funding Dmitry Yemanov to
support his excellent work in the project, - and we have the capacity to
continue funding that grant for at least another year.

Recently the Foundation has accepted sponsorship offers from IBPhoenix
and Atkin & Associates. This has raised our funding level for the
current year over 12,000USD enabling us to also grant some funding to
Alex Peshkov for some Fb 1.5 development tasks and to Claudio Valderrama
for the task of reviewing code changes.

Targeting Dmitry, Claudio and Alex as the initial recipients of grants
in no way diminishes our appreciation of the extraordinary efforts of
all others who participate in Firebird. We would like to also emphasize
that our grants do not compensate Dmitry, Claudio and Alex at anywhere
near the commercial rates they would normally command and they too
deserve our appreciation for their extraordinary efforts. However we
hope the grants will allow our grantees to devote time to Firebird, and
that all others involved in Firebird will get some benefit from seeing
our project proceed due to their work.

The Foundation would like to expand its support to other Firebird
development activities that we consider need our attention. As our
current priority we would like to raise enough additional funds, through
increased membership and sponsorship, to provide grants in the following
areas:

1. Quality Assurance/Testing
We would like to provide a grant to progress the development and
refinement of the automated test suites based on the original InterBase
TCS suite, and the new QMTest suite developed by Pavel Cisar.

and

2. Security Audit & Enhancements
We would like to provide a grant to allow a person to participate in a
security audit of the Firebird codebase, and most importantly, to enable
that person to fix any issues raised during the audit.

So if you or your company are users of Firebird and get some benefit
from the work done thus far, or if you are a potential user and our work
is likely to be of benefit in the future, please consider becoming a
FirebirdSQL Foundation member, or becoming a sponsor, or making a
donation, and help us to progress this important work.

More information about the Foundation and information on how to join can
be found at:

http://www.firebirdsql.org/foundation/


Yours Sincerely

The FirebirdSQL Foundation Steering Committee

Gary T. Benner, Helen Borrie, Lucas Franzen, Frank Ingermann,
Aage Johansen, Sean Leyne, Mark O'Donohue, Andreas Pohl,
Phil Shrimpton, Thomas Steinmaurer, Karsten Strobel, Martijn Tonies,
Svein Erling Tysvaer, Claudio C. Valderrama, Jason Wharton,
Geoff Worboys, Dmitry Yemanov