> I didn't say "Stop the community dead in its tracks". I did
> say "Kill firebird", but that was an abbreviated reference to the
> sentence in the prior paragraph where I said "if the FB project
> stopped advancing...".

Okay, agree here. If one were to hire 5..10 of the right individuals,
development progress would slow significantly. I think it would take
about a year for development speed to recover to its current level.

Actually, this is true for most proprietary stuff as well. If you
take out the right 10 individuals from Oracle, development speed
would be impaired for a year as well. Remember that all the key
individuals of the IB team walked out in 2000 and Borland recovered
too.

It is imho pretty tough to stop a product/project, once it has real
momentum. Firebird has that momentum.

> If you're right that there are tens to hundreds of people with
> enough understanding of the core engine to keep it moving, then I'm
> wrong, and HAPPY to be wrong

Hundreds is perhaps over-enthusiastic, but certainly 50-100
potentials in my opinion. Several talented individuals have left the
core team in the last five years for various reasons and so far new
talent stepped forward into the gap within a short time-frame.

> In the short term, if the organization that buys Borland's IDEs
> decides that Firebird's existence is a hinderence to Interbase's
> sales, then they could decide to spend more money. [...]
> Doesn't sound that far-fetched to me.

Well yes, it might raise IB sales this year, but it would leave IB in
the same position as so many other proprietary databases, with
limited potential for growth. Note that the DevCo investors would be
looking for an exit (industry sale or IPO) within a few years.
Although this year's profit would be higher, the exit value would be
much lower.

The community brings enormous value to FB, as does their community to
Postgres. MySQL and Ingres are spending big bucks trying to grow a
community. I really don't see the business logic of killing a
succesful community around a code base.