At 06:08 PM 2/25/2006 -0500, Steve Summers wrote:

>All they'd have to do is make unrefusable
>offers to a few of our key people like Claudio, Dmitry, Helen, or any of
>several others, and it could prove to be impossible to recover from the
>loss. But without the ability to compensate them for their time, how would
>we respond to something like that?

Hmmm. I think you've fallen into the trap of playing their game on their
terms. We will always fail if we do that. In other words, if any of the
large commercial DB entities wanted to hire these people away from the
Firebird project, then there is nothing we could do about it. You don't
really think, even if we came up with a wildly successful funding scheme,
we could counter their offer with anything truly competitive, do you? (I
would only hope that these people would hold out for truly indecent amounts
before giving in to the dark side.)

No, we should not run scared of such a turn of events. We should, instead,
continue to maximize our efforts within the resources we have. And stick to
the fundamental open source principles - we are all free to use or not use,
improve or not improve, benefit from or not benefit from Firebird without
legal or commercial encumbrance.