Hi all,

The whole IB/FB support list issue has two sides: political and
technical.

1) The technical side which importance grows with list's growing
popularity and number of users is related to:

a) annoyance that new users must subscribe to yahoogroups lists
(even with web-only access) just to use more suitable (with high
traffic list like this) NG interface. AFAIK it's the main point that
Sean has with ib-support list, and I tend to agree with him on this.

b) reliability of yahoogroups.

It just happen that it was not worth the effort to move ib-support to
another more NG friendly location/host. Maybe it's right time to re-
evaluate this issue again. Proposed creation of ib-support at
SourceForge under Firebird project would be very quick and easy
solution, but unfortunatelly, this has also some political incidence
that I (and some others) would like to avoid. So we would need to
find other host for mailing list side of ib-support. Any proposal?

2) The political side is mostly clear to all involved. The ib-support is
a neutral ground for all ib/fb users regardless what version, flavour
or operation environment they use. It's unique, as there is no other
such forum, and there is a lot of value if we'll retain it's open nature.
Of course, it can look like Firebird project lose here something in
favour of other IB versions, but actually the opposite is true. The
success of any open source project is derived from it's community,
where the bigger and more diverse is better, because free flow of
ideas and experience is a blood of any open source project. And
after all, the openess and non-discriminatory nature is a pilar of
Open Source, so we can't compromise it.

Just my 0.02c
-- Pavel Cisar

There is nothing wrong with InterBase
that Firebird can't fix for you
http://www.firebirdsql.org