>>I take it that your worry is at a higher level because FireBird is open

source/volunteer. There are lots of examples of commercial software that
have been abandoned: Clipper and Visual Objects (Computer Associates);
Turbo Basic (Borland) ; VMS (DEC). And there are examples of Open Source
software that have persisted for a decade or longer: the GNU C compiler,
Emacs, FreeBSD. So, while your concern is (in my opinion) a valid one, it
is true whether you go with Borland's offering or IBPhoenix.<<

At this point supporting the open source model is actually a better business
decision.
Borland is a publicly held company and has a responsibilty to their
shareholders to make
a profit. If IB becomes a major loss issue, they will have to abandon it or
risk a shareholder
lawsuit. If on the other hand they are making money on it by keeping
internal costs down, by
dropping the quality of support and causing long delays for future versions,
then it might still
be a better idea to turn to Open Source.

I really wish Borland and everyone else would get together and solve this
split.
As far as I'm concerned, if Borland wants to make a real difference for the
future of
IB, they should offer testing and certification services for the open source
developers and
quit trying to develop a seperate version. Unfortunately Corporate Egos may
not allow common
sense to get in the way.

Just my .02

Joe Carney
jcarney@...