Hi, Markus.
Actually I can't be treated as member of community, because
I don't participate in engine/tools development, I'm database
designer and application developer, so my opinion is somewhat
"look form the side", but nearby side.
My heart likes many of your ideas, but not all of them. Maybe
I'm old cynic, but life teaches that most reliable position is
to base on economical interests, I don't reject morality, but
all of us must eat/drink/smoke etc.
I think while two branches of this RDBMS will exists (how,
to hell, carefull when choicing words we must to be now!),
tools/components developers will be interested to support both
even if they personally prefer one of them. I think excessive
polarization will be evil, though persons can accent their
preferences and motivate it.
It is good for (develop) process to be officially headless,
leaders by natural way became leaders for their skill and
activity. But it is bad for product to be headless, without
coordination center it will be amoeba, not product. Why not
IBPhoenix to be this center, they merited it. If about the
name, Phoenix and Firebird are relative enough, IB shows
parent, and, how I can understand, people that makes a great
deal for Firebird participated in Interbase birth and grows.
I think it will be better if IBPhoenix will support
"official" releases and docs and Firebird be the name of
product and Open Source Community. Imagine I come to my boss
and say
- "We have to buy Firebird and entrust to it destiny
of our company."
- "What is Firebird, who sale it?"
Variant 1.
- "Some clever guys made it and wrote on CD."
Variant 2.
- "Company IBPhoenix sale official release, product
is assembled from efforts of the skilled developers over
all the world. They sale CD, printed docs and support".
No matter I can evaluate product from my own experience,
our world is ruled by bosses mainly. And take into account
that I'm old wolf, what about replenishment of programmer's
army? They need product that allows them to make money to
live and is free for education, practice and small first
commercial products.
One more economical aspect, IBPhoenix will be interested
in communitie's prosperity to fast and quality evolution
of product, community members will be interested in IBPhoenix
as propagandist of their ideas, to make name as participants
of successfull project (and make money from own projects),
maybe some fee, I don't know details of existent interrelations
and can't forecast it's evolution, life is long (I hope).
After all, it's not my interest.
So I think direct links to release source, bilds and docs to
IBPhoenix will be fine. Firebird site is place for beta for
future release source, builds and docs, news etc. If you ask
what is the differences from Borland's scheme - no hidden part
of source, reasonable prices, absence of user's amount licencing.

Best regards, Marcus, Community.