At 04:18 PM 7/30/00 +1000, you wrote:

>Earlier today, Geoff Worboys wrote:
>
>Eh? Sorry, it sounds like you just don't get what open source is all about
>and how it operates. Please explain how projects such as KDE, Sendmail,
>Apache and others became so successful *before* any money was poured into
>them. You assert that without a company and money, an open source project
>cannot succeed - you are wrong. These projects succeeded because of the
>support of their respective communities; commercial support and investment
>came later.

Good point I would also add Postgres into that mix especially because it
competes with interbase. Not till this year did any company attempt to make
any money from this.

It seems to me that the community will either form or not depending on the
excitement for the product and the proverbial itch to scratch. Right now
it's obvious that there is a community of sorts already established because
of the long history of the product and the loyalty the users have shown to
the product. It remains to be seen weather or not this community will
actively participate in making this thing even better. I think there is
quite a bit of confusion about the community and newco and it all has to do
with who owns what. If the newco will own the official documentation for
the product as well as the build tools etc this is potentially just as bad
as Inprise owning it. I don't mean to imply that Ann and Co. are as
clueless as inprise but lets face it when you have a company your goal is
to make as much money as possible. Open source projects are not motivated
by profits that's what makes them special.

Here is what I humbly suggest. Let Ann, Paul and whoever wants to join up
form whatever comapny they can and do whatever they want. If they can
wrestle the docs and stuff from Inprise and resell them great!. I am sure
they can sell support no problems. Although Inprise is being slimy I will
grudgingly admit that the all of the docs and tools were developed on their
dime and they can do with it whatever they want.


Let some third party people who belong neither to Inprise nor newco be the
leaders of the community or some non profit organization. Of course this
would be Jim and perhaps a few other people who have no dealings with
either company. They will be free of taint and can be trusted to advance
interbase and not the profit motive of some company. Let them set up the
CVS tree and be the final arbiters of what gets added to the code and what
does not. After a small core of developers gets set up and an
infrastructure we the community would have to build our own tools and
documents. These documents would be owned by community adn would be the
"official" documents. If the newco or oreilly wants to publish an interbase
for smarties well then that's great.

David is right let's define what is what, Who does what, and for why. Jim
is absent is he in or out? Is he going to be working for the newco or not?
Is he willing to be in charge of the CVS tree?

Comunities are hard to build but before they can be built there must be a
clear vision and a strong leader. Right now it seems like we lack either.



----------------------------------------------
Tim Uckun
Mobile Intelligence Unit.
----------------------------------------------
"There are some who call me TIM?"
----------------------------------------------