At 11:41 AM 02-05-01 +0100, you wrote:

>Hi all,

Hi Gary!

>just when you thought you had me safely back lurking...
>
>We have a product that runs against Interbase 5.5 - my boss has started to
>look into Interbase 6 in the hope that we can move to that instead. I must
>have taken my eye off the ball because it came as a surprise to me that you
>still have to buy user licences if you use the official Interbase 6 product.

Not "still" but "again". Borland recently released a range of "editions" of IB6 under a slightly more expensive rendition of the traditional per-seat licensing model that you have come to love so dearly with IB 5.x and older. There is no "free InterBase" now unless you want to roll your own from the source code (not "certified", though, whatever that means). In that case, you will be using "Open Edition" but you won't be allowed to call it "InterBase". AhemBase?

>Which leads to my question - what is the status of the Firebird project at
>the moment? If we wanted to deploy our software using Firebird rather than
>IB6 (potentially to a large number of sites) then how close are things to a
>production release

About a month or two, all going well with the punish and burn testing. The current betas are pretty hot and you can look at the known and fixed bugs at http://firebird.sourceforge.net/sections.php?op=listarticles&secid=1
Do try it out and thrash it yourself, though.

>, is the support operation up and running

Yes. www.ibphoenix.com. - commercial, top support.

Lotsa websites and an internationally-based Marketing Division gestating in the IBDI list. :)

>I personally would love to see us move down this route, it seems that the
>future of Interbase _is_ Firebird - there certainly seems to be enough
>momentum. I just need to provide answers to commercially-biased questions
>from the "powers that be"...

Get the questions and I bet you will get the answers. Visit the firebird website (http://firebird.sourceforge.net) for news and stuff.

Cheers,
H.

All for Open and Open for All
InterBase Developer Initiative · http://www.interbase2000.org
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