At 11:28 PM 17-11-01 +1100, I wrote:

>My message means that anyone deploying the driver commercially COULD be violating the licence and therefore, if I wished to deploy it commercially, I would want to make sure it would be legal to do so.
>
>With FB itself we don't have a problem since the IPL is there for all to see. The Intersolv driver belongs to the IB 5.x Borland commercial distributions. There is no "open source" or "free beer" IB 5.x...

.. of course, there could be already some kind of waiver that I don't know about...

But let's assume for now that there is no waiver. I think this offers an interesting challenge to those who confuse open source with free beer.

If you don't want to use the free Firebird ODBC driver, or can't for some reason, then you have a perfectly reasonable option to *buy* the commercial driver from Easysoft, that was written for IB 6 (which the Intersolv driver was not). It always was meant to be one of the benefits of a "commoditized" database, that developers of third-party products would be able to create commercial add-ons and make money. I don't have a problem with that. Do you?

Helen


All for Open and Open for All
InterBase Developer Initiative · http://www.interbase2000.org
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