Helen Borrie wrote:

> At 12:38 PM 11/04/2010, Jim Starkey wrote:
>
>
>> Damage to Firebird was all self-inflicted. Oh, and kicking people out
>> of the project for "anticipated future inactivity" (thanks Paul and
>> Helen) didn't help, either.
>>
>
> For the record -- Jim was NEVER kicked out of the project. For reasons best known to himself, Jim made that story up. It seems he's still dining out on it.
>
> When Jim was active in Firebird development, he (like other active developers) had an honorary membership of the Firebird Foundation. "Honorary" has no semantic association with laurel wreaths: it means "free of the obligation to pay a membership fee". So, while Jim was active in Firebird development, he saved $300 a year on Firebird Foundation membership fees.
>
> After Jim announced he would no longer be active in Firebird development, because he was developing a new backend engine for MySQL Enterprise (Falcon, I believe it was) his honorary Foundation membership was vacated...not because he was Jim, particularly, but because honorary memberships are *always* vacated when the developer retires from active development. He got the customary email informing him of the fact and inviting him to continue as a paying member. It was his choice not to - so he kicked himself out of the Foundation as well. If he ever returns to the Firebird Project as an active codeworker, his vacated FF membership is still sitting there, waiting for that day.
>
> Jim pulled himself out of the project mailing lists. He also sent me a bunch of very insulting (and highly inaccurate) emails. Those actions were his choice, too.
>
> That's all there is or was about it.
>
>

Actually, the truth is quite different. At the time MySQL acquired
Netfrastructure, I was actively working on Vulcan, and the agreement
with MySQL contained a provision to let me finish the work on Vulcan.
Helen jumped the gun, however, and rescinded my honorary membership in
the Firebird foundation while I still working on it. I don't how the
rest of the world view it, but in my part of the world the withdrawal of
an honorary member is a vile insult, suggesting that the former member
was not, in fact, honorable.

Vulcan stopped that day. Vulcan was fine grain multi-threaded,
supported multiple Firebird engines and a gateway to Interbase, had a
robust security architecture, layered configuration management to
simplify multiple servers per machine, and had the code base refactored
and encapsulated into proper objects.

That code and effort was lost due to Helen's vindictiveness (with an
assist from Paul).

--
Jim Starkey
NimbusDB, Inc.
978 526-1376



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