At 01:29 PM 26/05/2005 +0000, you wrote:

>I was as some trade show this past day and a vendor there told me that
>Firebird has been horrible for reliability for his clients and that
>Interbase is much more stable. Can anyone spell out the differences
>between the modern Interbase vs Firebird? I thought they were
>basically the same.

"Basically...were", yes, five years ago. But Firebird has been developing
totally independent from Borland's staff or products for five
years. During that time, Borland has had full access to Firebird's source
code. The reverse, of course, is not the case.

The big difference -- the one you encountered -- is that InterBase has
vendors, that is, people whose income depends on people BUYING what they
VEND. Vendors talk market-speak.

People don't buy Firebird, they take it and use it for free. Firebird
releases take a long time to gestate. There are no vendors or shareholders
screaming at us to "release and be damned!" There are no quarterly sales
figures to fudge. If Firebird really was unstable, it would be
well-known: you can't keep secrets in open source.

Did this vendor tell you that "modern" InterBase 7 was so unstable that it
couldn't be used safely with any database? Did he tell you that the
supposed bug-fix release, 7.1, that followed it, corrupted databases? Did
he tell you that the 7.2 patch to fix *that* problem was unannounced and
was distributed only on request? Or that Borland itself withheld the
bug-fixes from its direct customers unless they paid in full for the
distribution that had broken their databases? Or that customers are
required to purchase an "upgrade" to the (reputedly) stable version 7.5?
Probably not...

Helen