> How do we counteract this perception of Firebird being leaderless?
>
> http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,39668,00.html

Overall, Firebird offers good support for developing Web-based applications that require comprehensive features around
programmability, data types, and industry-standard interfaces. Although Firebird has good DBMS technology, it remains leaderless,
with no vendor driving the project. Firebird has good penetration in the developer community, especially in Europe and Australia,
but it lags in mission-critical production deployments, largely because of its lack of comprehensive technical support available
from vendors. Firebird is best suited for customers that want an easy-to-use database to support small transactional and Web-based
applications.

As with any Analyst report, the results tend to be utter garbage. No matter
how often you explain things to them, if they aren't going to listen, or
understand you are on a loser. Nobody said the project was leaderless, because
it isn't - there is an admin team that look after it, but unlike other open
source databases the project isn't driven by a commercial company. Postgres and
Firebird work in the same way by utilising a large community of followers.

At the same time the Analyst has ignored the people he spoke to who use Firebird and
come to his own - wrong - conclusions.

The problem you have, is that to make money the report must sell, and therefore must
have "interesting" things to say. Alternatively (or as well) it must identify a
company that is better than all the rest, so hopefully that company will pay to
re-publish the report. Nobody on the Firebird project was likely to pay
Forrester big bucks to reprint :-)

Its interesting - a Firebird user commissioned IBPhoenix to put together an accurate
report showing how capable Firebird was in the Enterprise and we interviwed some
very large users :-) I have asked to see if I can make that report publically available.

In the interim, I can only suggest that people take the time to email Forrester and
suggest that the conclusions are wrong.

Paul