Sean Leyne on the firebird development list:

Firebird is mentioned in reasonably good terms (on page 37) along with
MySQL, PostgreSQL and mySAP.

For more details have a read of the article at:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,367213,00.asp

Sean, being Canadian and terribly polite, didn't react to some
of the statements in the article. For those of you who disagree that

"Firebird ... [has]n't established open-source developer or user
communities, and online support resources are limited."

or that Firebird is more costly to manage than Oracle

"Graphical administration tools are available but simple in scope
and not competitive with the comprehensive configuration, control,
monitoring and tuning features found in the large commercial offerings.
Management costs are higher among these database products as a
result."

Here's the author's email address... timothy_dyck@...

Cheers,

Ann