At 04:00 AM 5/25/2004, Myles Wakeham wrote:

>Well if anything it attests to the power of the Open Source community.

Err... Well, Ingres hasn't really been big new for twenty years,
which is how it ended up in CA's stable. It's been purely limping
along on installed base for more than 10 years. The internal
architecture never really made the transition from Quel to SQL. And
it's competing with its successor, Postgres. So no, I wouldn't count
Ingres as a great tribute to the power of Open Source.

> > On 25-May-2004 00:12:37, marius popa wrote:
> > What next? oracle open sourc-ed :)
> > I even can't imagine that ...

Nor me either. For the corporate world, Open Source is a convenient
(plausibly deniable?) graveyard for cash cows that have gone dry.
That's not my point of view, but that's what seems to happen.

>...either its they've just given up against Oracle & MS SQL Server,
>or that they feel that this will better their product in the long run.

I'm not sure that better products are a CA concern, so I'll take the
first bet.

>I've always wondered what the motivation was with Inprise granting an Open
>Source license of Interbase.

According to one close observer, it started as stock fraud, moved to
accounting fraud, then customer fraud, and finally pure panic.

> Has their been any formal publishing of sales
>results following this for their software?

No.

>I'm wondering if a lot of corporations or government
>departments around the world did, in fact, get introduced to the technology
>through Firebird which made them invest in Interbase.

Based on very little, I doubt they got any lift from Firebird. They're
openly hostile to us. However, the continued existence of InterBase is,
as Set & Lester said, due to the efforts of the user community. A secondary
factor is the change in the Stock Market's valuation of companies after
the Internet bubble burst. Suddenly profitable products with moderate
growth became popular again.

Regards,


Ann