>
>In article <4.2.0.58.20000906120005.01dc41b0@...>, Helen Borrie
>wrote (to the interbase@... list):
> > It is a matter of record, whatever you want to say Ann told you...
> > Please see point 15 of the enclosed email.
>
> > Please would you answer us:
> >
> > Why do you think it is so important to construct a case against releasing
> > the Test Suites?
>
>
> > What is your mandate for representing the open source developer
> community's
> > view to Inprise?
> >

At 10:17 AM 07-09-00 +1000, Robert Schieck replied to the
interbase@... list:

>Maybe everyone thinks that screaming at Borland for transgressions that it may
>or may not have committed is bringing the community together, I do not!

I agree with you that the complaints are bad and that, when you force them
to occur in the interbase@... list, it is an undesirable interruption
to the flow there. However, using your list and the Inprise newsgroups as
a forum to spread ill-will yourself on the basis of false assumptions and
allusions to private discussions begs a response in place.

>Maybe everyone thinks that the snipes and numerous messages about the plight
>of IBPheonix and Borland cause users to come to this list , it doesn't! I get
>to see them unsubscribe.

I doubt very much that anyone has unsubscribed from the mers list because
of "snipes and numerous messages about the plight of IBPhoenix and
Borland". Except for the first week in which the Inprise executive's
decision to kill the ISC spinoff was made public, the mers list has been
virtually free of such threads.

It is hardly reasonable to expect nil reaction to such devastating news,
regardless of the disruption to the noble main purpose of the mers list
(still the best support list anywhere, thanks to the participation of core
InterBase people like Ann Harrison and your continued generosity in hosting
this and other IB-related lists).

>Maybe everyone thinks that potential users who stumble across this list and
>see a community that is divided, claims of a lack of support from the owners
>of InterBase. etc., will jump on board and pick up InterBase. I do not. If I
>were them I would move on down the road to postgress where there is no
>squabbling and there are no claims of a lack of support.

Unfortunately, it is true. However, the current lack of support from the
owners of InterBase combined with the now overt "spin" campaign being
conducted by yourself, Jeff Overcash and John Kaster is not doing the
Inprise cause any good. Whatever your intentions, you have done only harm
to Inprise by your misrepresentations. The public which you are addressing
will not be convinced by disinformation. As long as you yourselves
continue to disseminate smears and untruths into these fora, you can can
expect rebuttals.

This is the "spin" which is being promulgated by these these people in the
borland.public.delphi.nontechnical newsgroup, now spilling over into the
mers list:

Spin 1: The initial Win32 distribution was broken in two places. That was
the fault of the ISC team and Ann Harrison in particular because Ann was in
charge of the build. Ann was charged with responsiblity for a good, tested
build and she failed.

Fact: On July 17, Dale Fuller instructed Ann Harrison to prepare for the
sources to be opened by Inprise and to change the headers to remove the
references to ISC. What went into the distribution was ordained by Dale
Fuller, not Ann Harrison. Ann and her team produced tested kits which
proved good.

On July 24, Dale Fuller ordered that the IPL (licence) and the headers be
changed and that the distro had to be up on the Inprise sites by 5 a.m.
Tuesday 25th. Chris Jewell was put in charge of this, not Ann
Harrison. The errors (bad version of IBConsole, bad datestamp on
msvcrt.dll) were his. Ann Harrison was excluded from this process and was
not informed of the location of the files so that she could test them herself.

Spin 2: Inprise's 5-week delay in fixing the broken kit was due to not
being informed that there was any problem.

Fact: the mers list was loaded with reports of the problems throughout the
period. As Jeff Overcash informed the newsgroup, he and Rob Schieck are
"working closely together with Rebecca Pavagnari" (Borland Enterprise, the
division which is now in charge of InterBase). Jeff himself fielded the
IBConsole bug in the mers list several times.

Officially, Inprise provided no channel of information for its InterBase
community. This remains the situation today.

Spin 3: IBPhoenix is a company competing with Inprise for its support
business but it has no support staff except Brett Bandy and no in-house R &
D staff. This company is spreading a smear campaign about Inprise such
that it is possible to tell what is the truth.

Fact: IBPhoenix is a community group which is working to establish a
company on the model of the ill-fated ISC. It is not a company. It
employs no staff. The current effort is all voluntary. The first activity
the new company will engage in will be to employ support staff and provide
the technical support that Inprise is incapable of providing. To this end,
it is taking pledges from potential customers that they will use the
IBPhoenix support services when they become available. It is not a
competitive situation: it is an implementation of Inprise's
publicly-expressed intention to have third-party companies providing support.

The IBPhoenix group has engaged in no smear campaign. On its pages at
www.ibphoenix.com it expresses only facts - no suppositions, no smears, no
spins. Don't take my word (or the Borland "spin team's" word - look for
yourself.

Spin 4: IBPhoenix has set up a source tree project called Firebird, in
competition with Inprise's official tree.

Fact: The Firebird tree was set up by a community group which wanted a
read-write tree and use of project facilities to post information, bug
reports, test scripts, and bug fixes and to run mail lists. It did so in
response to the lack of such facilities available. At that time, the
InterBase tree was unused and the CVS tree set up by Rob Schieck was read-only.

Ann Harrison contributes to the Firebird tree as a valued participant and
in no other capacity, as do others who have formerly been engaged in
InterBase R & D. She asked to be included in the Inprise tree and was refused.

Spin 4: IBPhoenix is waging a smear campaign against Inprise, in which it
is impossible to sort out fact from fiction.

Fact: IBPhoenix has stated nothing against Inprise and has no reason,
policy or intention to do so. Almost all members of the IBPhoenix group
are active members of the Borland tool developer community, with very
strong motivation to help Inprise get past the situation it has placed
itself and the InterBase customers into.

Several on-line magazines have published articles about the fiasco. The
first to appear was from Michael Bernstein, on Technocrat.net. I didn't
know him; but he approached me with his first draft, which contained
several inaccuracies, and asked for my comments. He had previously sent a
copy of the draft to Ted Shelton who, at that time, was in charge of
InterBase. I offered corrections where I could and asked him not to
submit, citing the involvement of Borlanders and our desire to resolve
matters reasonably, without resort to the on-line press. Notwithstanding,
I requested that he pass it to several other people, including Ann Harrison
and Paul Beach, which he did.

Some days later, after the draft had been corrected several times, he
decided to submit the article. The version which was eventually posted was
different to the last fact-checking draft he had circulated, and contained
some new inaccuracies. I posted a feedback pointing those out and the
author posted an apology.

As far as I know, the other "bad press" appeared spontaneously. The two
articles in the Client/Server journal were, in my opinion, scurrilous and
sensational, badly written, biased and inaccurate. The fact that they
"dished" Inprise did not in any way redeem or justify their publication, in
my view. The Slashdot response to the Technocrat article seemed to me to
be off-topic and trivial, adding nothing more than was already been
circlated in the lists.

In my own articles and postings, in these lists and on the IBDI web site, I
have held resolutely to the wish that Inprise and the community would work
together and that the InterBase code would not fork. To me, the community
consists of all of us, Inprise R & D, IBDI, the people who use and
contribute to the mers list, the former InterBase R & D people who have
stayed in touch, and, now, the people in the Firebird project. I have a
particular concern for newcomers to InterBase and the need to provide
resource materials. I am a member of the IBPhoenix group and I can say
categorically that everyone there is of the same mind.

Spin 5: This is IBPhoenix vs. Inprise.

Fact: IBPhoenix has not published, nor propagated in any way, any negative
view about Inprise. There has been a lot of "bad press" for Inprise in the
mailing lists of the InterBase community. IBPhoenix does not own those
lists. IBDI owns this list. The other lists are either owned by Mer
Systems or have no affiliation other than "community". The bad stuff has
come from Inprise customers, not from the IBDI and not from IBPhoenix. 70
per cent of InterBase developers are also Delphi, JBuilder or BC++B
developers who love the tools and have as much vested in Inprise's good
health as anybody in the Delphi lists. The spin being put on the InterBase
situation by the Overcash-Kaster-Schieck operation is a completely false twist.

The barriers to reunifying the community are of Inprise's making. These
are the factors:

1. Inprise will not communicate. After one month, we still do not know
who is charge of InterBase. The information that a person called Rebecca
Cavagnari in Inprise Enterprise is somehow leading InterBase has leeched
out through a non-InterBase newsgroup. Consider that the majority of
people affected by this lack of communication are Inprise customers and
VARs. This highly important aspect is being addressed NOT AT ALL by the
Inprise PR machine.

2. Ann Harrison is the acknowledged leader of this community. Her
attempts to set up a communication with **anyone** at Inprise have been
ignored and she has been excluded from the InterBase SourceForge
project. Her performance as leader of the ISC project has been subjected
to a newsgroup campaign of untruths and half-truths from two TeamB members
(Rob Schieck and Jeff Overcash) and John Kaster of Inprise Developer Relations.

3. Important questions (from an Open Source developer's perspective)
continue to go unanswered. Of especial note are those to do with the
testing tools (which I will deal with in another response), the release of
technical documentation and the proprietary amendments to the Mozilla
Public License.

Inprise continues to withhold all technical documentation. Rebecca
Cavagnari's one and only communication to the community group was a
response to a private email from Paul Beach regarding a 1991 document by
Deej Bredenburg, which was circulated, with the document attached, to a
number of community members he considered would be interested in making it
available. Rob Schieck forwarded his copy of the email to Ms
Cavagnari. She responded by threatening legal action and stating that
Inprise would decide what documentation would be released to the public.

The "testing tools rage" has arisen from Inprise's unwillingness to respond
or inform on the matter except in the context of the entire Test Control
Suite. What developers asked for was the means for individuals to test
their own work. Inprise's sole response has been to indicate that the TCS
would be leased to a commercial company. The only message which developers
could take from that was that, in order to test their work, they would
either be required to pay someone to do it (hardly an Open-Source-friendly
policy) or build their own testing tools.

On the matter of proprietary control of contributed work there is no
movement. It is my observation that, had things turned out differently,
ISC would have need to attend to its own proprietary amendments on the
original IPL with urgency. I believe that Ann Harrison would have attended
to it immediately. Communication I have had with her since the objections
first arose confirm that she recognised the problem and would have needed
to act quickly to put it right.

The aggressiveness of the Inprise-changed amendments, combined with
Inprise's refusal to get involved in discussing any possible accommodation
of open source concerns, has caused a hardening of attitudes among the
developers which was, IMO, completely avoidable.

I sincerely believe that the Kaster-Overcash-Schieck spin campaign is doing
nothing to help the situation. As a dedicated Borland-supporter for as
long as there has been Borland, I'm highly concerned at the harm that has
been done in the newsgroups by three respected people whose previous works
I have admired. It has been a clumsy, careless piece of disinformation
that is backfiring on Inprise and causing dreadful harm to Kylix's prospects.

I will address the test suites and the other points raised by Robert
Schieck in further messages.

Thanks for your patience,
Helen

http://www.interbase2000.org
___________________________________________________
All for Open and Open for All
___________________________________________________
Team JEDI Member