Jim Starkey wrote:

>
>
> Claudio Valderrama C. wrote:
>>This is a luxury for an open source project. The marketing dept at a
>>commercial entity won't allow this to go further, as the number of
>>iterations may be big.
>>
>
> Marketing at Interbase reported to me.

At Cray we were told *never* to talk to sales or marketing -
they had a disturbing habit of selling things that were
still in development :-)

Of course we were lucky in that requirements were driven by
government standards - meeting these allowed you to sell Cray's
to the UK and US .gov's.

Personally I dislike the visionary model. It has a disturbing habit
of dropping things that are wanted by the many but disliked by the one.

I have seen this happen twice (with companies folding because of it)
and only seen it work once (Tim Bunce of perl DBI fame).

No common vision
----------------
With a project such as Firebird you have a big problem in that
the 'user base' is so diverse. For instance I do not care one whit
about embedded and am looking to process telecoms data fast and in
very large volumes. Currently firebird is not yet "there" AFAICS.

From my perspective, the Fyracle project seems to have done more
for prospective FB adoption than any proposed new features.
In my case I know FB is not a viable MS_SQL alternative (too
expensive to re-engineer) but could easily be the Oracle killer
*if* this was taken as a key objective.

Having lurked on this list I *know* this will never happen. I can
understand why but I do feel it is a great pity.

Jacqui