Hi Markus

Verry impressive and well thought out article.

Just a few quibbling points and a bit of discussion, Firebird from it's
inception has had people from all walks of life, one of beauties of it
is we dont really care, as contribution is important, your affiliations
less so. In fact most of the main contributors to the current code base
do not come from any specific organisation.

What is Firebird? I agree that it encompasses a much more extensive
community than just it's developers and in this sense it involves people
in the IBDI and InterBase communities as well. As someone pointed out
Firebird and InterBase are relatives, and a lot of our supports/
extented community seems to be addicted to other Borland technologies as
well, so I see the larger Firebird community involvment as being fairly
mixed, and as you point out not being particularly anti-Borland.

I suppose I see Firebird as fairly close and a strong overlapping with
the IBDI community. Most of us in Firebird also work/have
worked/continue to work with InterBase and although I see the products
as different I don't necessarily see the membership of the communities
as being so. The IBDI also shares the fact that it is a "not for
profit" organisation.

The comments on the Firebird trademark and Firebird Association" I think
are very interesting and as we grow the association sounds like a good
direction for us (I was punting on a "Firebird Foundation", mainly
becuase of the name :-), but association seems to fit our picture fairly
well).

Are we a "meritocracy"? Currently I think it goes on who does the work
gets the say. Perhaps we are following Riccardo Semmlers maverick
example, or more likely it's becuase there is a lot of work to do and
we're happy to have anyone who is willing to participate. Im not sure
what *crasy that one comes out as but I'd like to know if there is a
word to describe it.

On the IBPhoenix, while I agree with what you say, I think that overall
IBPhoenix has put in a lot to the FB/IB community as a whole, and not
just Firebird without a lot currently in return. The documentation for
instance was all their own work from personal archives, knowledge and
contacts. Overall (not particulaly in your article) I think they
deserve a bit more of a positive than they get, but it seems to get lost
when people start to stack them up against opensource, against Borland
and so on.

I remember one person pointing out in a borland newsgroup that the
"alternatve" non official sites (which I believe he was referring to
interbase2000 and ibphoenix were more "interesting" I hope that remains
so :-).

And we need to trash the web page :-O, I hope you broke that gently to
Pavel :-), since he has only recently change it to what it is today.
Again Im sure he'll be taking your comments onboard and next
metamorphasis we'll see what happens.

Thanks Markus very much for your very informative and insightful
comments, and for the logo, which seems to have made a splash. These
are all things that help us move forward.

Now for me it's back to testing.... :-).

Regards

Mark

--
Your database needs YOU!
http://firebird.sourceforge.net


markus.soell@... wrote:

> Hello,
> thanks to Helen for having explained so well how IBDI, IBPhoenix and
> Firebird have come to be (your answer to the Firebird/IBPHoenix
> Politics message).
>
> I've tried to type an answer to your message, but also and mainly to
> this entire discussion about the future of the Firebird SQL database
> and how the community should deal with Borland Corp.
>
> Well, I ended up with quite a long text and finally decided it's
> better to put it on a HTML page rather than posting to the list.
>
> You can find it here:
>
> http://www.soell.ch/firebird/howto.htm
>
> Unfortunately I have another job waiting to be done urgently and so I
> won't be around much for next couple of months.
>
> I wish all the best for the Firebird project and hope my text can
> maybe give some inspiration to the community about what to do next.
>
> Good Luck
> Markus
>
>
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