Andrew,

It seems that you are too new to InterBase/Firebird block :-) IB is well
known among Delphi users, and enjoyed (in Firebird's incarnation) the big
boom for last two years. The Firebird/IB OE installed base is now
estimated around one million servers running world-wide! Far far more
that five years ago. But the majority is on windows and many from that in
personal / single user environment, that's far away from other Open
Source contenders and users. But FB is a live and well., and with bright
future at least in its dominion (Windows & Delphi).

MySQL is well known for it's performance in web applications, but only
few use it for anything else. When Firebird will have better security
(the lack of it currently renders it unusable for webhosting), and few
PHP killer apps would be adapted for InterBase/Firebird (postNuke,
slashcode, phpMyAdmin), you'll see the change in favour of FB on web very
quickly :)

But you're right that Open Source journalists don't know it, only MySQL
and PostgreSQL. We have a long track to educate them, but it's the best
thing anyone can do right now to popularize Firebird. Open Source is a
buzzword of today, and we need to teach Open Source preachers to say
Firebird when they want to say PostgreSQL (who cares about MySQL outside
web apps? Just look at Novell and Red Hat, they push PostgreSQL).

And after all, Firebird is known far better than SAPdb :-)

Best regards
Pavel Cisar
http://www.ibphoenix.com
For all your upto date Firebird and
InterBase information