Hi all:

I believe that one of the best ways for us to help ensure that Interbase is
well supported in the future is to form our own virtual support group. From
all the postings I have read on various groups over the past few weeks, it
seems that we have some developers who are using Interbase for a variety of
internal IT projects, some who are building applications on it for resale,
independent consultants, etc. We have developer talent in several languages
on a variety of hardware platforms. At this point, we probably collectively
have more experience with Interbase than Inprise does.

Unfortunately, right now there doesn�t seem to be any easy way for us to
specify our capabilities, our needs, and experiences to each other. If we
had a publicly available database of Interbase developers, we could all
easily locate fellow developers that are geographically close, or that have
specific skill sets that we could benefit from. This would make it easier
for those interested in doing independent consulting for Interbase to �get
the word out� and find opportunities, and easier for customers of Interbase
to find qualified people to assist in supporting them and doing custom
development. Obviously there are a lot of different ways we could grow this
over time to strengthen our community, but as a first step I think we could
get much more organized as a community with this database.

What do you all think? The IB community certainly has the experience to
build such a database ;) and I believe I could secure a small amount of
funding to run it as an organized OpenSource project like they do on
SourceExchange or something like that.

Mike

Michael Eden
Vice President, Corporate Development
Management Insights, Inc.
14755 Preston Road Suite 525
Dallas, TX 75240

972-755-2064 Direct
972-755-2080 Fax
meden@...