Dear all:

The phoenix will not die, it's too late for Mr. Delay Jekyll Fooler to shoot
it. I can't believe he would be able to rewind the open source public
statement and tell us that now IB is a closed commercial product of Borland
and that all people should destroy their copy of the binaries and source
code.

When you have to take a critical decision, ask yourself: where do you want
to be? I know it resembles too much MS's phrase, but you have two choices:
follow Dale and a kilometer of broken promises and contradictory statements
plus some ISC employees (that obviously want to keep their salary, so they
can't be flamed) or follow the original designers of Interbase and the
people that really care about the engine (us the developers that are IB
customers and enthusiasts), probably helped in the future by those former
ISC people that showed their dignity and resigned in December to allow being
part of a circus.

Let's see: BorPrise has the money, the InterBase trademark and the PR force.
Do they have credibility after a festival of fiascos since 1999? How many
people are at ISC? Dave Schnepper, the expert in collations and
internationalization, left Borland in mid 1999 and he works as an
independent developer... offering the case-insensitive drivers that everyone
claimed for. Bill Karwin, former Director of Publications and Director of IB
in December, resigned. Paul Beach, developer acting as marketing guy,
responsible for an important rise of IB usage in Europe regardless of the
ultra-low marketing founds, quit in December, too, along with other people,
including Reed Mideke, the engineer in charge of the builds. Mark Duquette,
the specialist in the Services API and its [undocumented] predecessor API in
IB4 and IB5, quit at the beginning of this year. Who really strong remains
at Borland? Charlie Caro, the only IB employee who's with the company from
the prehistory. As promised, Jim Starkey, creator of Interbase, disappeared
from IB-Architect without releasing his new ODBC driver when he saw the deal
wasn't closed successfully on Monday. He was supposed to lead the engine's
further enhancements. Ann resigned to her position at Borland now that the
deal is officially dead. Another former ISC guy, Steve Tendon, now is the
owner of Interbase Nordic in Europe. Again, how many people are in the ISC
team at Borland?

What's the last buzzword at BorPrise? According to Jeff Overcash, Borland
will update the [dying] BDE to allow it to talk to dialect 3 IB databases.
It's like offering rotten potatoes as a dinner IMHO. Is that dbExpress is
another fiasco even before it appears? For those that have tested for
example, they can say if I'm fair or not when I say that ADONIS, a third
party ADO product, beats ADOExpress easily.

You can smell the plans of Dale for IB if you read his public statement that
Borland still makes money from products that were killed 3 years ago and
that Borland has enough fuel to run for 36 quarters. Let's remember people
that MS invested 110 million dollars in Borland the past year, so the
current financial state doesn't reflect the typical income in a normal year.

For me, the world is clear: IB is already open source, but there're
important missing pieces, so really this is not an honest open source. At
least the engine itself is out of the BorPrise oven, so I prefer to follow
the NewCo, whatever name it takes, because they care about the engine. They
will undertake any human and ultra-human effort to keep the product alive,
because they love it, so simple. I love BCB and Delphi, but this time the
path is clear: Borland's treatment of IB has been unfair over the years, to
be soft. Even a person suggested sarcastically that they discovered IB by
accident when they purchased Ashton-Tate to get Dbase. Nothing makes me
convinced that this time, things will be better. Read the last statement
from Ted Shelton and make your own conclusion. Read the past history of
press releases at
http://www.borland.com/about/press/
and know how Borland is clueless.

I don't know if Dale wanted to get the press's attention with the announce
of today but I'm not sure the shares are going to rise too much this time.
In all cases, I'm tired of this uncertainty and random behavior so I go with
the NewCo. Period.

C.