At 12:11 PM 8/11/2005 +0100, you wrote:

> > And immediately Thomas posts this, I get an email from ZDNet with the
> > following...
>
>Yeah, I was faster this time. ;-)
>
> > <<I was just wondering whether you have any comment on CA
> > selling Ingres, only a year after it released it as an open source
> > database?
> > http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-electronics/20051107/NYM181
> > 07112005-1.html
> > Why do you think CA originally open-sourced Ingres? Why do
> > you think it has changed its plan?
> > My deadline is 2pm today.>>
> >
> > So what do we want to say?
>
>Perhaps a similar situation with InterBase and Borland (you know that part
>better *g*), but:
>
>- Without a loyal community of (Delphi) users/developers
>- Without a small group who took the source code and initiated a completely
>new project
>- Without the possibility to let outsiders work on the source code

I don't think this last one is valid. Borland made it's IB6 tree read-only
as well, even though it had no licensed customers for it. For Firebird, we
did what open source lets you do: we duplicated the tree and started a new
codebase that the existing community followed.

The circumstances were different for the customers. The version of IB that
Borland continued to support was 5.6 and they never opened its
source. They had no licensed customers for IB 6.x until more than a year
after the open sourcing, when the source became closed and they let the
"open" IB just die.

Helen