--On 08 January 2000 12:59 +0100 Hotel Concepts
<Jacco@...> wrote:

> The news that Inprise/Borland stops research and development of
> Interbase was a great shock to us. We are a VAR of Inprise Corp and
> invested a lot of money in Interbase. I am not very confident that
> "Open Sourcing" Interbase will be very successfull, because of all
> the different perspectives and goals there can be in
> improving/altering Interbase.

If Interbase has a strong control group that acts as keeper of the
source, manages enhancements e.t.c, then I see a strong future for
Interbase. We need to avoid fragmentation and forking. But if we have
a strong team, then the community has allot going for it.

>
> When we received the news we immediately started looked for another
> database system, and we are currently evaluating SyBase. Unless the
> Open Sourcing of Interbase proves to be a success we can't sell our
> customers a "dead" DBMS.

Don't jump ship yet. The way I see it (and as a company we are in the
same boat as you), is that 5.6 still has allot of life in it (has
anyone got keys for linux 5.6 out of inprise ? ). We can still buy
and deploy viable applications for a number of years to come without
too much worry.

Our challenge, now Mr Fuller has thrown down the gauntlet is to find
ways to take Interbase into the next century (it hasn't started yet
has it (1/1/2001) ?) as a community, but with focused leadership and
control.

We have a huge amount of talent out there, let us rally together to
make this work for all our sakes, whether you are for open source or
not Interbase has to, and will live there is no question about that.

Regards
Tim Benest
TaskForce Systems Ltd
PGP Key at <http://www.benest.com/pgp.html>