> >>>Does anybody have actual copies of what WAS being said in
> >>>December 1999, as I have just been told that there was no
> >>>plan by Borland to drop Interbase, and I'd like to know why
> >>>I was concerned at the time :)

I have access to that information, however it was internal and confidential.
Any way as the ex GM of the InterBase Business Unit, let me say the
following...

Firstly a promise had been made that we were to be given more control over
our own affairs
by effectively becoming a business unit within Borland. By Dec 1999 this
should have happened.
For reasons that I will not go into, this was delayed by 8 months.

Secondly a lot of product positioning was going on and InterBase was seen as
a "sunset" product and
was about to be positioned as a "milk cow" internally within Borland. This
would have had a significant
impact on how the business wasrun and how money was re-invested into the
product in terms of R&D,
marketing etc.

I had a meeting with Dale re. this, and we basically disagreed on what the
future direction for the product was
going to be. If anyone tells you what happened at that meeting except Dale,
then that person is a liar. Since
only Dale and I had that conversation.And I'm not going into the details.

So I held a meeting of my management staff, told them what had happened and
said I was going to resign.
And did. Closely followed by others, then R&D staff started resigning, and
support staff etc
If anyone at currently at Borland tells you what happened at this meeting,
then they are lying too. No-one currently at
Borland was at that meeting.

As we walked out of the door, we suggested to Dale that he consider open
sourcing the product. He mulled this over
decided that this might be a good idea (look at the market cap of Red Hat at
the time :-)), and decided that setting up
a spin off open source company based on InterBase might be a good idea. To
that end, he later got Ann involved and asked me
to help out.

In terms of what happened re. the above on the lists, it seems one of our
users who we knew well and communicated with on
a regular basis tried to call me and Bill K. He couldn't get hold of us, and
mentioned this to the list. This prompted a rumour fest
re. what could possibly be happening.... Bill posted an au revoir note, me,
I just kept quiet.

You can find all this tuff by searching on the Mers list at IBPhoenix, makes
interesting reading :-)

Regards
Paul