> 4b. And yet, inspite of the "free" developer's base, FB Foundation thought it was becessary to spend substantial amount
> of money to hire Jim to do importatnt work. So do we have the talent, or not?
> so,
> 1a leads me to believe MySQL is unable to develop their own talent, inhouse, and with all the money they have. So what
> do they do? They hire a guy who worked for the competition.

Actually it wasn't the FF who hired/paid Jim to work on Firebird (Vulcan), it was me. via IBPhoenix
And als via specific funded projects - The main being the SMP enabling of the Firebird database engine
for SAS. Although Jim contributed to the lists, he has never been an active coder on the Firebird Project
until Vulcan came along, and Vulcan was developed as a separate tree to Firebird 2. Vulcan will be merged with
Firebird 2 to create FB3. To say the Project cannot continue without Jim is a misnomer, the project started without
Jim, ran without Jim and will continue to run without Jim. Firebird 1.5, and 2.0 were developed by other developers and any
other statement is a disservice to Dimitry(s), Vlad, Claudio, Alex, Paul Reeves, Pavel, Ann H.,
Nickolay, Adriano, Helen, myself and many others who should all be appreciated for all the work that they put in.
Mot to mention the work done on the drivers...

Regards
Paul