Hello all,

<disclaimer>
The opinions expressed in this post are mine and do not reflect the opinions of
my employers.
</disclaimer>

My company has been using Interbase since around 1992 on HP-UX and AIX. We have
been happy with the performance of the database, but somewhat dismayed at the lack
of marketing (Try explaining that Interbase is not a new version of dBase). The
announcement earlier this year that a new Interbase Software Corp. would be created
was welcome news coming on the heals that Borland/Inprise was going to deep-six the
product. Whether or not this was Borland/Inprise's intention is not important, the
perception was there. Now we have an "Open Sourced" Interbase without a new
Interbase Software Corporation to service, support and market the database. Instead
we are left with Borland/Inprise who is perceived to have not cared about the
database less than a year ago. Without a strong company to provide service,
support and marketing, I cannot see Interbase surviving in the corporate world.
It was hard to sell a product based on a database few have heard of. It could be
next to impossible without a strong company behind the product. That company does
not have to be Borland/Inprise. We bought our service and support through Cognos.
Cognos as of this year nolonger provides service and support for Interbase. I have
many questions/doubts about the future viability of Interbase. When I spoke to
Ann Harrison in March she was able to address many of my concerns, but with the
demise of the new Interbase Software Corporation I feel I am back at square one.
So I address these questions to Borland/Inprise, "NewCo" and anyone else who would
like to answer.

1) Without licensing fees to provide an income base, how will marketing and
development of Interbase be handled. How does Borland/Inprise or any other company
plan to make money?

2) How viable can a service/support only company be? Can it really survive on
service/support/subscriptions alone?

3) There has been lots of press about version 6 on Winx, Linux and Solaris. When
will the other platforms be upgraded to version 6? Or does Borland/Inprise plan
to keep these platforms on earlier versions to continue to reap revenue from them?

4) How will service/support be handled for older versions of Interbase?

5) The new version 6 was released without an ODBC driver or support for the BDE
except for Dialect 1 databases. When will an ODBC driver be released? When will
the BDE be upgraded to support Dialect 3 databases? We were looking forward to
support for large integers in version 6 only to find that we will not have access
to them. Ironically we had access to large integers in 3.3 and 4.x with gdml.
It's like saying "Here are those 64 bit Integers we've been promising for 2 years,
but you can't get at them from ODBC, the BDE, java ...".

6) What will be done to form alliances with third party companies? In our case
Cognos and MicroFocus.

7) Is there any plan to have an unified set of UDFs provided across all
platforms?

8) Where is Borland/Inprise's participation in the public forums? I see many
posts from people where involved in the stillborn Interbase Software Corp.,
but almost none from Borland/Inprise employees.

9) Where do I go on the web to find out information about Interbase? The
www.interbase.com site still seems to be the same material that was there when
the stillborn Interbase Software Corp. was running the site. I can find no
information at the Borland/Inprise site regarding purchasing service/support and
no information on platforms other than Winx, Linux and Solaris.

10) What will be done to better market Interbase? Why are there no books on
Interbase?

11) Will there be a subscription service w/ certified builds and updates during
the year? I believe for the Open Source version of Interbase to survive in the
corporate world there must be some form of paid support. Linux really began
inroads into the corporate world when companies such as Redhat began.

11) Will Borland/Inprise drop the licensing fees on pre-6.0 versions? If not,
how interested is Borland/Inprise in really seeing 6.0 succeed and upgraded across
all platforms if it is going to dry up a major revenue stream they have for
Interbase?

Thanks to all for any responses.

Kevin Joseph
kjoseph@...