Roman Rokytskyy wrote

>> How would that work? How can we loose the project? The only scenario I
>> can see is if they hire 10..20 people, and keep on hiring every
>> capable body that shows up. Is that realistic?

>The project and the core development team is not enough for our project. Our strength is our community. We have managed to

attract a lot >of ex-Borland customers (read Steve's response), but they can attract them back. After that we will have to start
from the blank page as >it was in year 2000 I guess.

The only way DevCo could attract my company back to IB is if it were free, and at least as stable and fast as FB- Or, if the FB
project stopped advancing and lost the key people needed to fix any critical bugs that might be discovered.

But I don't think an organization would need to hire 10 to 20 people to kill Firebird- I suspect they'd only need to get 3-8
core people. What's the learning curve of the FB engine's source code? If you get the main people who have climbed that
already, you'd stall (or at least greatly slow down) further development until the next group could get up to speed. Without
progress being made, many of the rest of the developers would get discouraged, wonder if there was going to be a future for
whatever it is they're helping with, and "postpone" further development until they find out. (After all- who would need more
work done on the dot net driver, the ODBC driver, the documentation, or any of the various ports, if the engine stopped
advancing?)

Meanwhile, the company trying to kill the project wouldn't just wait and see if it worked- they'd publicize the hiring of the
core team, inspire articles speculating on the shaky future of the now rudderless project, discuss how to port FB apps to their
product, make promises about adopting FB's best features and supporting its customers, blah, blah, and before you know it, the
"buzz" is that FB is dead, and its users had better switch sooner rather than later. It would be especially easy for DevCo to do
this if they retain IB but lower the price- cheaper to pay small license fees than to port your product to Postgres- at least in
the short term.

I'm in no way suggesting that I think this would happen. I'm merely speculating that re-open-sourcing IB and having DevCo put
some of the resources they save into FB, would be better for FB than having them work hard to figure out how to make IB more
profitable. That's especially true if they're no longer carrying the baggage of Borland's nasty and brain-dead management team
to turn off the FB people they'd have to woo. I also think it would be better for DevCo, since they'd be able to focus on the
dev tools, not infrastructure components, and let them be perceived as DBMS agnostic - unlike MS, their main rival in the
developer tools market.