At 03:00 PM 07-02-01 -0700, you wrote:

>What I really wonder is, what is taking so long?
>
>Are Firebird people thinking too far in advance instead of simply getting in
>the trench and knocking off the current rough edges?

This is a very unfair question. The Firebird people are working FOR FREE
and in spare time very meticulously through the list of outstanding bugs
and security holes. Firebird already has fixed a long list of bugs that
Borland has ignored - that does not happen overnight when the programmers
are new to 1.5 million lines of source code. It would happen faster if
someone threw some money at Firebird because it would allow one or two
people to work full-time on the code. It would happen faster if a few
end-users would step up to help with QA (especially on Windows).

Each release and sub-release of FB is more stable than the one before
(platform considerations aside - remember FB has 6 platform ports whereas
B. has two). At least with FB, what you see is what you get.

Like the documentation problem, the sourcecode development problem gets
back to one thing: open source software is NOT free beer.

Helen

All for Open and Open for All
InterBase Developer Initiative · http://www.interbase2000.org
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