At 04:35 PM 13-09-02 +1000, you wrote:

>Hi,
>
>This is moer on that longevity of Firebird thread that I started a week or so
>ago. The consultant who was uncertain about us relying on Firebird threw
>in the
>comment at the meeting that Borland has stopped development of Interbase.

Get your consultant to check his facts.
-- Borland stopped supporting its open source IB 6 version "officially" a
few months ago but in fact they never really supported it at all.
-- Firebird has no relationship to Borland whatsoever, either open source
or its commercial editions.

>Doesn
>anyone know why Borland would give it away?

Borland DID stop development on IB, actually in the late beta stages of IB
6 in November, 1999. Time passed, lots happened, and the beta IB 6 code
got open-sourced in July 2000. That's when the Firebird project
started....and has gone on through several betas to the current full
release Fb 1 and currently in development Fb 2, by way of Fb 1.5 (and no
doubt several more alphas and betas in between).

Meantime, Borland continued (sort of) developing InterBase commercially.
There have been two commercial sub-releases since Firebird started and they
have been touting the forthcoming v. 7 at all the Borcons.

Does your consultant know something we don't know?

>It's a confusing but fascinating picture.

Tell me about it.
:-)

Helen