Greetings all,

I have been away for a while and am only just now going through my close to
700 emails! This is really quite an exciting time for interbase to say the
least. Please forgive me if accidentally repeat a thread that has been put
forth.

Regarding what I can contribute. In about 3 months I can contribute
probably 4-8 hours/week. I feel my greatest areas of strength for this
project are user interface design and coding (the missing GUI tools!) and
project management related tasks.

There was a thread regarding some of the things Borland has been negligent
in and the one area that struck my interest was the issue of making IB an
attractive solution to developers in languages other than delphi. To that
end it seems there are some important issues to address such as:

1. What about the ODBC driver for IB? Will the source for it been opened as
well?
2. How can clients other than win32 connect to IB? Certainly there is
InterClient. Is its performance adequate?
3. Shouldn't there be a set of OCX's to access IB? How about a port of IBO
to Active X?

Obviously what I am trying to say here is that interbase needs to as natural
of a choice for non-borland tools users as well. Most notably it seems the
VB market is a huge and untapped "market" for IB.

I also want to amplify a point made by Jason. It seems that after reading
many of the posts of late there seems to be the impression ( I may be wrong
here) that Inprise can again make or break IB. Its eems to me though, that
in fact if IB goes open source, they simply have a chance to lose about
19.9% of their stake in a company that failed to market a proper "packaging"
of the IB open source database. And that REGARDLESS OF WHAT THE NEWCO DOES
WE STILL HAVE THE ABILITY TO MAKE IB WHAT WE WANT IT TO BE. The best we can
hope for is that the new company listens to what we have said here and we
can just keep doing what we would (probably) rather be doing
anyway...selling IB and/or developing great software that uses IB. Worst
case is we have to form some kind of legal entity to act as a steward of the
future direction IB development.

In any case, I agree that we are NOT "jumping the gun". We need to be
absolutely prepared to move forward now. In that light, I would also like
to add that just because NewCo is being formed does not mean there can't
still be another company doing the same thing as newco but doing it better
or differently. Seems like one activity should be attracting venture
capitalists in some way. I also am aware that there appears to be some
folks on this list who have and are willing to put up the necessary capital
for such a venture.

Well, I've rambled enough an hopefully haven't just repeated a bunch stuff
already posted. Its going to take me hours to get caught up.

Rob