At 10:30 PM 15-06-02 +0000, Brad Clarke wrote:

>--- In ib-support@y..., Doug Chamberlin <DChamberlin@A...> wrote:
>
> > You do understand that Firebird 1.0 and Interbase 6.5 are quite
> > different programs, don't you? They share a heritage
> > but implement different SQL
> > variations, have different additional functionality from Interbase 6.0,
> and
> > are likely to never become fully compatible again.

>Did Borland back out of the open source ideal, and has resumed closed
>source development of future Interbase releases?

Yes and no to the first, yes to the second. Borland resumed closed source
development of InterBase back in the second half of 2000. For a while,
they allowed some TeamB members to distribute binaries built from their
Sourceforge "open edition" tree which was updated by them occasionally,
mainly with bug fixes from the Firebird tree. Their internal tree was
never made public. One update published in January 2001 consisted of a
"red face fix", where old source code that revealed a security back-door
was removed. (Although it had already been fixed in the Firebird tree in
December 2000, Borland posted their own fix in this instance).

Recent statements from TeamB members and Borland QA in the Borland
newsgroups indicate that the so-called "Open Edition" has been abandoned
(not withdrawn) by Borland, for commercial reasons. I don't consider that
they "backed out of the open source ideal" since they never really moved
into the area of ideals. They contributed by opening most of the source
code of the IB 6 beta in July 2000. They can't "unopen" it.

To date, Borland has never been involved in Firebird in any way whatsoever.
That was Borland's choice, not Firebird's.

heLen

All for Open and Open for All
Firebird Open SQL Database · http://firebirdsql.org ·
http://users.tpg.com.au/helebor/
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