laurenz_brein wrote:

> I have been evaluating Firebird for a couple of days now, and I still
> have some open questions:
>
> - What exactly is the current relationship between InterBase and
> Firebird?

Frosty. InterBase is the proprietary product of Borland Software, sold
under a typical commercial license. The project code is closed.

> As far as I have read it is the ongoing development of
> an open source release of a previous version of InterBase.

A fork would be a better description. Borland planned to release
InterBase open source and promoted those plans for about six months,
then changed their mind. They did release on set of source code under a
variant of the Mozilla license. The Firebird project members include a
couple of people who were involved in the InterBase Open Source effort,
but nobody on Firebird has any official relationship with Borland.

> Are they drifting apart?

Drifted, considerably, though InterBase seems to pick up some of the
changes made in Firebird, and we try to understand and emulate some of
their changes.

> Are they being developed by the same people?

No.

> If development is independent, how come that many tool can work
> with both the Firebird and the InterBase client shared library?

Ah. The magic of architecture. The call interface to InterBase is well
defined and so far, Firebird hasn't diverged from it. As we do so, and
we will, we're moving to an architecture that will allow us to provide
an InterBase gateway so Firebird applications can run against InterBase.

>
> - Are the 'IBPhoenix Documentation' page and the archives of this group
> all the available documentation for Firebird?

IBPhoenix has documentation on our CD's, there's Helen's book, and
there's an open source documentation project.

> I find frequent references to InterBase in the available Firebird
> documentation. Does that mean that it is outdated?

No, just that for the the first 15 years of Firebird's history, it was
called InterBase.

Regards,


Ann