At 05:07 PM 05-12-01 +0200, Salim Naufal wrote:

>I am sure that if the Firebird developers had the money and resourses
>available to Borland, they would have reached version 2.

Also, if Firebird had some unacknowledged, unresourced, indefatiguable team of elves doing OUR bug fixes for us, just think how far we could be pushing the horizon right now, given the strength and dedication of the folk working on our code. In the past 16 months, we needed those strong coders for a LOT of bug-fixing. In Open Source, you take the current as it serves, them's the breaks.

I'd be sorry to lose Fred but I don't personally feel any warm fuzzies for a big corporation which feels compromised by a non-commercially-driven policy that refuses to stamp "certified" on software that is still short of passing the tests.

The point has been made before, that a "release" in the constantly-evolving open source environment is merely a line in the sand. It says "we added yay new features and yay bug fixes up to this point and we believe they work at this point". A full release isn't an end in itself, it's a marker on the track.

If a corporation wants a stronger database, it will stay around Firebird and wait for that point - where the *developers* are satisfied that things work. Then, maybe, it will accept its free-beer database with some gratitude.

If it wants a marketing team to decide when the release is ready, then it has plenty of commercial products to choose from.

Helen

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