Helen wrote:

Don't kid yourself that the Firebird developer team members are all
going to be willing to slave away year after year, unrewarded, making
Firebird better, just to enhance Borland's product line and provide
high-quality free software to a demanding horde of freeloaders.
Advancing Firebird isn't about holding back, it's about getting right in
there together with people who have an interest in advancing it.

--------------------------------

Dear Helen,

I am reminded of what MS is saying about the Open source movement. They
say that, in fact, Open Source often means the end of innovation and new
initiatives to a certain product. That's because without financial
support, the product would not have any developer left who would be
willing to slave away improving a product for free.

On the other hand, several of the open source proponents have a simple
answer to M$. They say, it is not about money. Rather, it is about fun,
making new friends, and self-improvement. The fact that the motives and
stimuli is non-monetary means that the product would be more elegant,
more carefully done, and would have less hidden bugs.

In my case, I was pretty much forced to use IBX + MIDAS by the job
requirements. MIDAS + IBX bit me with long running transactions, but it
turned out that the bugs where on the MIDAS side. (Although if one used
IBO, this would not happen because IBO can automatically manage
transactions). But after fixing the MIDAS bugs, myself, IBX + MIDAS
served the purpose.

However, without MIDAS, I would not advise anyone to use IBX by itself,
especially for data-entry purposes because it could mean long-running
transactions.

---------------------------

just to enhance Borland's product line

This is just a suggestion. Jason could decide to do the ultimate by
developing an IBO version for Visual Basic or Visual C++. This will
enable millions of Visual Studio developers to use Firebird. And the
connectivity tool need not be Borland based (hehehe)

If there were such a tool, I'm sure there would be an exponential growth
in Firebird users.

Joseph Alba
jalba@...