Mmmmm, everyone's a little defensive, so I'll try to answer all on this one
post. As I said "let me play devils advocate" in my first post ;) Maybe
y'all missed that part ;
Anyway, I don't make the "rules" of this huge international company (Bell &
Howell), I'm only a lowly little 'ole software engineer, mostly on the
database side.
We currently are shipping IB5.6 and paying the license fees. That's all part
of the product cost and has been for the years that we've been using IB.
We, and I'm only speaking for what the company says, have more than enough
work to do, supporting our products and producing new products, so as much
as some of us may like to work on FB, it won't happen. As far as
contributing money that we pay for the license fees to FB, that won't
happen. Lemme see, I'll go to the corporate chief and say, hey, if we give
xxxx dollars to FB it'll get out quicker, they'll say, we don't care. IB5.6
is working just fine and we can get IB6.0 now, if we need it for anything.
We would pay a license fee, just as we do now to Borland, for FB, but it's
not available.
As I mentioned before, we can't and won't (I don't make the rules) ship beta
software to customers, many of which are huge companies. It just won't
happen. Now if "released" software is buggier than beta software, as some
have implied here, well, that's something else. I realize that "released",
"GA", "beta" are just names, but, as I said, I don't make to rules.
Getting back to the released, beta thing, if/when, we start shipping
something other than IB5.6, it will be a "released" version, and it will
have undergone probably a good solid month of heavy in-house testing.
Soooo, again, as I mentioned, I was/am playing. Someone, smartly, replied
"what competition" or something like that, and I was just playfully
replying, that from some view points, Borland *is* competition", in that
they have two "real" GA type releases to FB's no GA release. Now if the
Borlands releases are less or more buggy than FB RC's is another story.
Anyway, I'm on FB's side people. If anyone needs to, switch to decaf ;)



Cheers,
Fred Wilson
SE, Bell & Howell
fred.wilson@... <mailto:fred.wilson@...>


-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Beach [mailto:pabeach@...]
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2001 7:52 AM
To: ib-support@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [ib-support] Borland strikes back with IB6.5???


<<Well, let me play devils advocate for a moment.
Let's see,
- number of releases from Borland post IB5.6 -> 2 (IB6.0, IB6.5)
- number of releases from Firebird -> 0>>

It depends on how you view things, there have been a number of releases from
Firebird on a large number of platforms, all building towards FB 1.0.
We would like to lnow that 1.0 is as rock solid as we can make it. How many
people have tested/played with 6.5? I wonder what the bug situation is and
how they are going to react if and when bugs are found?

We have acted promptly to the issues raised in RC1, and are building RC2
now.

<<We (the compnay that I work for) can not and will not ship beta, RC, etc.,
code, only release code. We've been asking here (Mers until it went down),
when is FB 1.0 going to be released. All we ever hear is "real soon". The
link someone posted to IBPhoenix regarding RC2 says the same thing, that is
RC2 will be available "soon".... We (the company that I work for), may have
to go to Borland for IB, since "real soon" has been a "real long time" ;)>>

Very nice. There is a huge difference between an open source project that
typically relies on contributions of time and effort by a number of unpaid
developers and a closed source project. You can't schedule that time. Now if
we could pay for more developers to spend more time on the project, then
schedules become easier to manage.

If you got to Borland are you going to pay for licenses? If thats the case,
would you be willing to contribute the license fee you are going to pay to
Firebird?

Regards
Paul Beach
Main Tel (UK):+44 (0) 1844 354465
Mobile: (UK): +44 (0) 7764 188603
http://www.ibphoenix.com <http://www.ibphoenix.com>
For all your upto date Firebird and
InterBase information




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