Si Carter wrote:

> Existing customers, yes. What about potential new customers, who see
> Firebird @ v1.5 when SQL Server is on 8 with a beta of 9 (2005) available,
> MySQL which is coming to Version 5, PostgreSQL which is on whatever version
> its on and Oracle which is on v10i.
>
> How does this versioning work with the **perception** of new customers,
> especially corporate customers who have the means to provide so much to
> Firebird (in terms of backing and exposure). IMO its irrelevant that FB
> started from v6 of Interbase and has had an excellent feature set from the
> year dot, if its *perceived* as an immature product *some* people will not
> touch it, especially managers of medium/large corporations who are scared
> for their jobs and don't like to "rock the boat".

We have discussed this argument to death when Firebird project was
started and the decision to start versioning from scratch was made.
Maybe this low version number really gets off some managers and
potential users (it was true and reasonable before we reached the 1.0
release, as some users has policy to do not touch anything below than
version number), but what the heck. We want users that will use Firebird
on sound reasons, not thanks to some marketing tricks. Only these users
that know very well why they use it would not be disappointed with
Firebird, and we rather want smaller group of happy, satisfied users,
that whole lot of disappointed ones. Well, the conservative approach of
Firebird project to versioning (many would agree that version 1.5 would
deserve major version bump) and release management (it took more than
year to get 1.5 from alpha to final) may drive off someone, but great
many users I ever speak with were happy with it, as sound sign of
responsibility and maturity of Firebird Project. The fact that we were
not aggressive to push Firebird was perceived as our plus by those
users, that distinguish us from others.

If we would be a commercial company, then I would tend to agree with
you, but as open source project, we don't need to exploit all possible
ways to push Firebird into user throats.

best regards
Pavel Cisar