> Fuller's latest moves have made an immediate fork inevitable. A name
> change looks inevitable, too. This is not a huge problem - Inprise has
> helped greatly by ensuring that this 15-year-old product has practically no
> brand recognition.

I agree with you completely.
Supposedly most people here are completely fed up with being at
Delay Foolers mercy.
A soon fork is absolutely necessary to avoid any further suffering
from Dales random behaviour and arbitrariness.
A database management system is much too importang to be toyed
around with like Dale enjoyed to do it.

Nevertheless, I am somewhat unclear about the intended future relationship
between the new fork (let's call it for now the small-bad-apples-database,
sba-db for short) and the Inprise-Interbase-fork.

Do we aim at a peaceful coexistence ?
In "real life" this always is a good idea and the best way to go
(my personal opinion), but considering how Dale Fuller has
fooled us and especially some the most engaged
ones of us, I can't imagine to go this way in our case..
After all, it is Dale Fullers ridiculous harrassement
which forces us to fork *and* to change the name.

The other, more martial way would be trying to starve out
the Inprise-fork.
For example, this would mean that we do no longer create a
"Interbase Developers Handbook"
and we do not create a
"Interbase and sba Developers Handbook"
but only an
"sba Developers Handbook"
without ever mentioning Interbase.

Another idea would be to insert some kind of Id-function in the open source like
String GetSystemName () {
return String ("small-bad-apples-database");
}
People could be encouraged to specialize their useful tools for sba by checking
against this function.

I know, this is the Microsoft way of doing things but regarding how
this two-faced Dale Fuller took us all for a ride....

In the back of my head is growing the notion that some people
who now probably feel like Dale Fullers personal goofs would
feel more comfortable with the idea to donate their
contribution to sba but not to the Inprise-fork.

Having an absolutely excellent ODBC-driver available _only_ for sba
--just as an absolutely random example-- would indeed give sba
a huge headstart advantage compared to Inprise-Interbase.
The same would be true for replication engines and the likes....
Specializing good tools on sba would let stand Dale out in the cold rain.
And this is where he belongs and where I want him to be...

On the downside, there is the risk that the developer community would split.
How many of the people willing to translate the IBDH are willing to
translate the SBDH?
What would be the attide of former Interbase VARs towards sba
(especially if they called themselves interbase-company or the like)?

Besides other considerations, would such a martial
move comply with ethical standards ?

Regards

Frank