At 04:07 PM 14-08-00 -0600, Tim Uckun wrote:

>Could somebody please translate this or elaborate some more on it.
>
>from the IBDI website.
>
>"During the week, author-editor Helen Borrie announced to the translators'
>committee that progress
>on the book would be stopped for a few weeks, until confidence returned to
>the commercial
>community and it would once more become possible to secure the necessary
>sponsorship for the
>project"
>
>Does this mean that this document is on hold till newco gets some money?

This is a book of 600,000 words involving an enormous amount of research,
writing and editing. That is nine months' full-time work. Publishers who
have been approached are not interested in commissioning, because of the
scale of the project, the unknown status of InterBase in the reader public
(yes, this old problem is still with us) and/or the fact that Open Document
licensing denies any publisher exclusive rights. They will consider only a
finished manuscript.

This project can go forward when there is the possibility of sponsorship
for my time during the nine months the book will take. Companies which
might have considered sponsorship are now waiting, on their own accounts,
to see whether involvement with InterBase is going to be viable.

50 translators are waiting about for topics to translate. We have all
devoted many hundreds of hours already to the book project. I made the
hard choice to put it on hold until there is some certainty that continued
effort will produce results.

As to being "on hold until Newco gets some money", the relationship is
indirect. A stable, thriving InterBase with a growing commercial developer
community is the environment which will create demand for the IBDH and a
will in the commercial community to support the effort to make the
publication of in-depth documentation possible. We had that environment
and it has been capsized.

"On Hold" does not mean "cancelled", it means "in recovery".

>Does anybody know the reason why Jim is holding the ODBC driver back.

I would be surprised if aspects of Jim's position were not very similar to
my own. I can't speak for Jim, though. My own position is a matter of
simple economics.

Helen

http://www.interbase2000.org
___________________________________________________
"Ask not what your free, open-source database can do for you,
but what you can do for your free, open-source database."
(J.F.K.)