One of Oracle's Success probably is due to a united and cooperative
development team.

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 8:54 AM, Jim Starkey <jstarkey@...> wrote:

>
>
> 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 Helen jumped the gun, however, and rescinded my honorary membership in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
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>



--
"When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and
when you meet him he will win. "
-Ed Macauley


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