Hello Ilir,

>>- Are the numbers of downloads of a particular release of the Firebird
>>server recorded anywhere centrally, and if (at least approximately) these
>>numbers are known, can they be shared?

The sourceforge pages will give you a start:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=9028

There is a problem with that pages: they will not let you know the
values of sub-releases.
For example, for Firebird 1 for windows you will just see values for the
1.0.3 release (74998 at the time I write you this).
The values show there don't include the previous releases (1.0.2, 1.0.1,
1.0.0, and the RC's). Firebird 1 was in Beta Release for a very long
time, and Beta 2, for example, had much more downloads than 75K - even
beta, was used in production for a very long-long time by many users.
Does anyone know how to get stats from the other releases ?

However, keep in mind that there are other sites all over the world
acting as non-official mirrors where you can download Firebird that will
affect this stats.

>>We are interested on doing some research on how much the classical

Software

>>Reliability Growth models can be used for Reliability predictions of a
>>server based on the bug reports for that server and the download rates.

For a product such as Firebird, this will be really difficult. Firebird
Downloads are made mainly by developers, that in turn will provide it
with there own applications. Has a such, a simple Firebird download from
sourceforge can easily represent hundreds of installed servers, and
millions of end-users.

Artur