Yaffil Merges Source Code with Firebird
=====================================================
Moscow, St Petersburg and The World, 2 December 2003

The Firebird Project and the principals of the Yaffil project are very
pleased to announce the merging of the Yaffil project with Firebird. Former
Yaffil chief developer Oleg Ivanov is welcomed as the newest member of the
Firebird core developer team.

Yaffil, a Russian, Windows-only version of the Firebird database engine,
was built
originally from the open source Firebird code with a number of additional
features. It began life as a private project, before becoming available as
a commercial distribution from iBase.ru, of Moscow. Separate Yaffil
development has since ceased, product sales have been stopped and all the
sources have been released for merging into the Firebird 2.0 code base by
the Firebird development team.

For Firebird, the homecoming of the little red bird is welcome news. First,
it allows the two closely-related codebases to be united in a single tree.
Both will gain strength by moving forward in a single direction. Secondly,
it brings into the design scheme a number of significant enhancements,
optimizations, architectural improvements and character sets/collations.

For Yaffil users *, the proprietor of iBase.ru, Dmitri Kouzmenko, says
migrating to Firebird 2.0 will benefit them by enabling them to
* work with the cross-platform database server
* use the new features
* have access to full project source code.
He also notes that, as Firebird is being developed by a big team of
developers, partly financed by the FirebirdSQL Foundation, the combined
project will continue to develop and progress.

Coordinated efforts between the Firebird core developers and Oleg Ivanov
will ensure that Yaffil users will be able to migrate easily to Firebird 2
with only minor changes to their applications and databases. To Dmitri,
this means that users will have Yaffil's advantages of better performance
and lower CPU load along with the benefits of the cross-platform server, an
open source product and a number of unique features. He considers that,
rather than having two teams spending energy on implementing conflicting
features, it would be more productive for them to work together on new
features and bugfixes.

The FirebirdSQL Foundation is discussing a proposal to grant some funds to
assist with an early merger of Yaffil's most useful special features into
the codebase for a forthcoming post-version 1.5 sub-release of Firebird.

From the Firebird Admin team and Dmitri Kouzmenko

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Bug fixes for current Yaffil products and technical support for existing
customers will be continued by iBase.ru.-- D. Kouzmenko