Subject Re: [Firebird-general] Firebird - Interbase connection
Author
Post date 2014-04-02T08:19:25Z
1. Firebird 1.5 is end of life and that means if you need support you can get only from ibphoenix 

You can migrate to 2.0 then 2.1 to a supported release but that needs testing and effort from your part (backup restore , test if all works)
some features are deprecated and the api can be changed  please consult the release notes
You can see some of the issue that can happen following this presentation 

2. Licensing issue : firebird grants you the following rights http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/mpl#main-features-of-the-mpl (idpl is derived from mpl) and doesn't restrict you in any way in the usage 
you can use it in paralel with any server interbase that you have license for 

but of course you can switch to firebird 100% :) so it will eliminate the interbase license costs (lock in)

I see you work for bombardier , it would be nice to have a case study if possible  
http://www.firebirdsql.org/en/case-studies-catalog/

---In Firebird-general@yahoogroups.com, <mark@...> wrote :

On 31-3-2014 10:33, jay.pandya@... wrote:
> I did not know where to put following queries, so I am asking this to
> both general and support forums.
>
> One of our application tool/software is using Interbase as the Database
> server, which is, of course, a licensed RDBMS.

You might want to clarify what you mean with 'licensed', technically
most (if not all) software is licensed, even if it is free.

> Our tool works with both Interbase and Firebird 1.5.6.
> I am aware that Firebird is open source SQL RDBMS.
>
> I have few doubts which are as follow :
>
> *First:*
>
> If we use Firebird for our future use, is the latest version of Firebird
> would be compatible with our tool ?
> OR
> we have to make major changes in our source code to be able to work with
> Firebird 2.* ?

That is unanswerable. If you look at the release notes of Firebird 2.0,
2.1 and 2.5 there are some changes that might break compatibility, but
that highly depends on what your code does. You are the only one who can
answer that by studying the release notes and your source code, or by
testing your application against a higher version of Firebird.

> *Second*:
>
> As Firebird is an open source RDBMS, is there any licensing issue
> attached to it ?
> I mean, Is using only Firebird would/should eliminate the licensing
> thing attached with when using Interbase as an RDBMS with our tool ?
>
> OR Am I understanding it completely wrong ?

What do you mean with 'licensing issue' and 'licensing thing'? As most
software Firebird has a license, however Firebird is free and in most
respects you can do whatever you want with it (within the confines of
the license).

Mark
--
Mark Rotteveel