At 02:21 PM 11-01-02 +0000, you wrote:

>>> The open source version of Interbase is the same way.
>
>What's the difference between the open source version of Interbase
>and Firebird? Is Firebird just a derivative that's being maintained
>to keep up with commercial Interbase?

Not at all; in fact, many would say that commercial InterBase is just a derivative that's being maintained to keep up with Firebird!

Both commercial InterBase and Firebird started on the same piece of ground at the end of July 2000. The Firebird team formed immediately and began bug-fixing the code. A few enhancements crept in initially but most of the first few months were spent just cleaning up code and improving its "buildability". Builds for multiple platforms appeared.

Then, in April 2001 Borland released its first "commercial editions". Up to that point, the source code in the Borland tree had remained untouched except for a security-patch added in January and a few bug-fixes harvested off the Firebird tree.

On the commercial release, Borland posted into their public tree what they said was the sources that were used for the commercial release. If so, nothing much had changed except for the addition of a few more fixes taken from the Firebird tree. There were no new binaries. Those which you can download from the Borland site are still those ancient ones from a year ago. For a while, a guy called Rob Schieck ran untested automatic builds on open edition code but that stopped some time ago. So "Borland Open Edition" seems to be a museum piece. There was a hint from someone on the list who had heard it from someone on a newsgroup, that Borland might release some the 6.5 source code some time in the future, perhaps when IB 7 happens... but the Borland IB boss Jon Arthur also announced publicly that only bug fixes would be going into the Open Edition code...so who knows? We watch the tree from time to time and if they come up with something good that we don't have, we'll us!
e it.

Meanwhile, Firebird has continued with bug-fixes and enhancements so that, except for a couple of "new features" that B. added to 6.5, Firebird is pretty well ahead in the game.

> Or, are the two on separate tracks

That's a reasonable assessment right now. In particular, once Firebird gets past the "RC" stage and releases a build with a magic "1" beside it, that will be the end of any serious new development on the old C code base. FB 2 (written in C++ with a lot of code restructuring to remove the deeply endemic problems and limitations) is well under way.

>so that down the road the same database can't be managed by either system?

It looks fairly likely that Borland is trying to go down the road of making their server unable to use a Firebird database; but the reverse is not true. Firebird will continue to do whatever it takes to enable InterBase databases to be upgraded to Firebird. However, there is no question of the Firebird dev. team adopting a policy of "holding back" to wait and see what Borland does.

Borland is apparently already taking defensive action to try to protect itself from losing commercial customers to Open Source. Commercially, that's fair enough. It would have been a pleasant surprise if it had been otherwise. But it's a one-sided competition, isn't it?

It's still the same database with the same advantages over "the rest". Whether it's being developed by Borland and sold in licence packs or developed by Firebird for anyone to take and use, both manifestations continue to do and behave as traditional IB users expect. The effect of the commercial fork shouldn't be over-exaggerated, IMO.

regards
Helen

All for Open and Open for All
Firebird Open SQL Database · http://firebirdsql.org
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