At 06/17/2002 01:51 PM (Monday), randmonroe wrote:

>I appreciate the responsiveness from the ib-support group with
>technical issues that have come up and would like to move to
>Firebird, where will Firebird be in a year?

None of us can predict the future, but here is my guess:
Since there is great value in the Firebird source and the project has a
vital core of developers contributing to the maintenance of the source
code, I expect Firebird 2.0 to be achieved. Exactly when is a completely
open question but I would predict sometime in 2003. There is a backlog of
good ideas for improvements which many people want to see realized. This
will also contribute to the momentum.

The Firebird 1.0 release will probably undergo several fixes during this
same time frame. the longer we go on the less likely it will be re-released
since the focus will naturally turn to work on 2.0. However, the dedicated
volunteers will jump to fix any really serious bugs because that's just the
kind of people they are.

Rest assured that regardless of what new releases come out there is an
active community of Firebird supporters and companies which depend on this
software so the program will not simply die and go away.

As an ultimate fall back position you can always consider switching to
Interbase from Firebird in the future (with little pain). However,
Interbase's position in Borland's product lineup remains as cloudy as it
always has been.