Its amazing how time distorts facts.... and although I am reading this
exchange with interest, I wish to add a couple of corrections.

> > December 99: Bill Karwin, former product manager of IB on
> > Borprise (Helen, correct me
> > if I made a mistake here) and flames and hoaxes and all type of
> > speculation about the
> > death of Interbase Relational Database Server came and flow like
> > lava rivers. This epoch
> > is related, by the ones that were on NGs and message lists on
> > that moment, as being
> > the "Black December". Pressure at Borland CEO gets to the sky.
>
> IB people resigned on Dec-14. The issue was known almost by accident on
> Dec-17 and published immediately in Mers-list by Greg Deatz (author of the
> freeUdfLib).

Bill was at the time that he resigned was the acting R&D Director for
InterBase at Inprise/Borland, as I had asked him to take over that position,
from his previous position as product manager, because our previous R&D
Director (Madhukar Thakar) had left.

On the 14th three people resigned initially - 1. Paul Beach, General Manager
of InterBase, 2. Bill Karwin acting Director of R&D and 3. Wayne Ostiguy
Services and Support Manager. This was then followed by others, in a sort of
tidal wave.

>
>
> > Jan 2000: Borland ( called Inprise on that moment) announce the
> > open of source code
> > of Interbase RDBMS and Ann Harrison(original co-author of the
> > software) initiates nego-
> > tiations related to the expurge of Interbase line of products
> > from Borland to a new compa-
> > ny, commanded by her and Paul Reeves (initially)

Paul Reeves would be thrilled by this, but although Paul is part of
IBPhoenix now, he wasn't asked by Dale to set up the Open Source spin off.
Intially it was Ann and I, and we were then introduced to Matt Larsen who
would handle operations.

> Jim started because ISC and EasySoft couldn't agree on the development
> price. The gory details of the failed agreement are not clear as to

comment

> on them. Later, Easysoft continued developing their driver.

Jim did the ODBC driver, because he offered to do it cheaper and faster than
Easysoft, he also had a better architecture.
He also agreed to Open Source it - once he got paid for the work.

Regards
Paul Beach