Duleep,

Sometime progress happens without being obvious. I
think the Firebird project is going very well, considering
the challenges it faced at the beginning. Remember that
a year ago, we assumed there would be a coherent, funded
organization directing development and that it would include
all the Borland engineers.

>What percentage of the hosting companies support
>FB/ IB under Linux ? almost Zilch

That's right. And the current security model is a
serious problem there - no one is going to want to
use InterBase on a server that's shared between
organizations if they have to share security databases.
The fact that we can't run two versions of the server
on a single machine is another problem.

Both those problems can, and will be solved, but
they require undoing quite a lot of code that has
been in the product for years. Not something I'd
want to jump into. So, for the moment, I think that
hosting companies can not be our target.

>Is Firebird well positioned in the market ? NO

The phrase "positioned in the market" can mean at least
two things - first that the product is appropriate for
the expected audience - or second that the expected
audience is well aware of the benefits of the product.
We're OK on the first and hurting on the second.

We need to raise our visibility - but not before we're
prepared to show the world a great product.

>Are we ready to take on the big 3 ? Maybe

Are we going to convince CitiBank to drop Oracle in
favor of Firebird? Not this week. Can we drive Oracle
and DB2 out of Linux? You bet.

>Are we going somewhere ? No. We are in the middle of
>no where.

This is where I disagree. Starting with a huge amount
of completely undocumented code that didn't build, we've
got a bunch of ports working. We've got a bootstrap build
that doesn't require a running InterBase. We've got
an increasing number of engineers who understand large
parts of the code, can (and do) fix long standing problems
and add features. Did you ever get the error "Column unknown"
when adding a big procedure? Claudio Valderrama has taught
DSQL to report the name of the unknown column. It was a
two line change! The challenge was finding the right place
to put the two lines.

>Are we living in the past ? Yes. we are still under
>the bore-land shadow

No. We're working toward the future. We're building a
Firebird V1 that's going to have lots of neat differentiating
features, while learning how to operate an all-volunteer
organization. And I think we're doing a pretty damn good
job of it.

>Do we have the answers ? Maybe... Maybe not

We've got some and we're figuring out others.

>We need to do much more to make things happen.

OK, great. How would you like to take on building installation
scripts?


Regards,

Ann
www.ibphoenix.com
We have answers.