Jim Starkey sent the letter below to the Firebird admins and asked
me to forward it here. This is a great opportunity for Jim and
for the technology he's worked on for the past seven years. As
for my plans, MySQL have been very supportive of my intention to
continue to work on and for Firebird while working for them part
time as a senior architect.

What changes does this acquisition bring to Firebird? Almost none.
Jim’s work on Vulcan is done. He’s not the right person to lead its
integration with Firebird 2. I’ll continue my work on the Vulcan Mac
port and other areas of interest and help documenting and integrating
Vulcan, and of course, continue to explain Firebird to novices and
database experts alike. From my new position, I hope to encourage
more cooperation between Firebird and MySQL in areas where our interests
coincide – possibly test suites, certainly new syntax – ways to
demonstrate to the commercial world that cooperating open source
projects are a viable alternative to monolithic commercial solutions.

Sincerely,


Ann

Here's Jim's letter:

My company, Netfrastructure, Inc., has been acquired by MySQL, AB. As
part of the agreement, I will be working full time for MySQL. I expect
to lurk on the architecture list from time to time and may contribute
the occasional wolf-o-gram, but I will not be taking an active part in
Firebird development. Although Ann will work for MySQL, part time,
translating from wolf to English, she will continue to be active in the
Firebird project.

My decision to join MySQL has almost nothing to do with Firebird and
everything to do with Netfrastructure. The Netfrastructure platform
represents what I feel about contemporary computing hardware and future
application requirements, and has been the center of my technical heart
and soul for six year. Some aspects of Netfrastructure technology have
already been contributed to the Vulcan project, but Firebird and
Netfrastructure are architecturally incompatible. An attempt to
integrate the technologies would be unlikely to meet the goals of either
project.

MySQL and Firebird have never seen each other as competitors and I doubt
this will change in the future. The projects have different open source
philosophies, different technologies, different customer bases, and
different sweet spots. The ideas behind the two projects are, happily,
public and available to all. If MySQL and Firebird compete, it is only
competition in offering the best possible support to their respective
customers.

I am pleased to have had the opportunity to finish the Vulcan project.
The combination of Vulcan SMP and architecture combined the rich feature
set of Firebird 2 will make a solid release and a superb platform for
future development.

I wish the Firebird project all the best in years to come. And if you
need an opinion, please feel free to call.