Jason,

> I would just like to report to the IBO community that the Firebird
> Conference in Luxembourg was a great success. There were over 60 people in
> attendance and the sessions I attended were all very good. It's amazing what
> is being done with Firebird and what is coming in the future. Things are
> looking very good. The IB Objects session was well attended and it felt like
> some useful things were learned even by some of the long-time customers. If
> anyone is interested, the entire session was recorded. I can see about
> getting permission to put it up on YouTube or to post an MP3 download of it
> on a file sharing site. Send me a private email.
>
> I think most of the fun we had was getting a personal contact with all the
> people we rub cyber shoulders with every day. Hopefully in the future there
> will be more people to come and attend.
>
> I would like to stress the importance of everyone who uses Firebird to
> consider being a member of the foundation. Your opinions truly matter and
> your financial contributions are an investment in Firebird's success. All of
> those who develop Firebird are awesome people. I really enjoyed getting
> acquainted with them personally. I wish for them to have the means to be
> compensated financially for their efforts in Firebird. It could be a
> significant and justified temptation for them to get hired away from their
> efforts. The best way we can keep their brilliance and talent solely
> dedicated to Firebird is to give it the resources to secure their interests.
>
>
> I am working on an idea to give a discount to all those who are members of
> the Firebird Foundation so if you have some ideas please let me know. I
> would like to be a strong supporter of Firebird as best I can so I am
> looking for ways to accomplish this.

It was a pleasure to meet you after quite some years now face-to-face
again, although I didn't recognize you from the beginning (*g* sorry
about that). For those of you, who can't follow me, check out the
conference pictures at Facebook.

The conference is a great possibility to talk to experts of various
areas and the stories are really great and entertaining. Usually a
conference day doesn't end with the last session, but gets continued at
the restaurant, bar etc ... so there was plenty time available to
discuss further ideas in more detail, although getting older, recovering
time from such a conference is getting longer. ;-)

Jason, it's great that you have been visible to the community at the
conference, which signals that IBO is actively developed and interesting
discussions with you clearly underlines that.

I'm too working on an idea to give Foundation members a discount on my
products. It would be interesting to here, if such offers make a
Foundation membership/sponsorship a little bit more attractive, as in my
opinion, the current member list is really a VERY, VERY small fraction
of the Firebird user base out there.

Right, Firebird is under open source, in particular, an OS license which
pretty much qualifies as "free beer". But, moving Firebird forward costs
money. The core dev team lead by Dmitry is a highly skilled team of
software architects and engineers making Firebird an excellent RDBMS
capable hosting databases > 100 GB with 400 users, as shown by a case
study at the conference.

I would like to stress as well, even as a current Foundation Committee
member, to financially support the project by getting a membership,
doing a one-time donation or joining the boat by being a committed sponsor.

Thank you very much.

Regards,
Thomas