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Borland's Interbase Open-Sourced
A slew of people have written in with confirmation that the beta version of Borland's Interbase will be Open Source. This comes on the heels of rampant speculation that this move would be forthcoming. Their press release states they expect to release in the first quarter of 2000. One interesting point is that they are not just opening the code for Linux - the Solaris and WinNT versions will be open as well. However, no mention of what license they plan on using, so I'm sure we'll be revisiting this story.
That being the case, what are they doing? And is Microsoft beind it? If not, I can't see them being too happy.
Speculation back then seemed to say that Inprise/Borland would be hesitant to support/port apps to Linux, when in fact the opposite is showing true. What's going on here?
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LOL... a "leadership role in the Open-Source movement"? Do they even know what that means, I wonder... :-)
Anyway, jokes aside... I think this is a Very Good Thing. I'd say that Linux needs a lot of database offerings like this. Especially open source offerings that we can work on and improve. Although the Linux version of Oracle is good, its closed-sourced, and AFAIK targeted only for RedHat. (I've had major headaches to make it work for Debian.) An open-source DB would alleviate this headache by allowing easy re-config for a particular distro. But even more importantly, it gives us industrial-quality code to play with. IIRC Interbase used to be quite popular, so there must be some good stuff in there.
While MySQL is nice, it doesn't quite give enough features (though the speed is... amazing). I've not used postgre before, so I can't judge. But regardless, having a lot of DB options in Linux is a very good thing. Especially in convincing upper management to switch to Linux: a lot of ppl probably know about Interbase and at least non-techies can take comfort in the fact that Interbase is a "commercial-quality" product (though for techies that probably means zit).
Just my $0.02.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
One of its most interesting features is that the InterBase server scales all the way down to running on a Windows 95 machine. This is perfect for those who don't have neither the money for Windows NT nor the guts for Unix/Linux. Also, as I recall, the military was big into InterBase before the product was bought by Borland. So there are a lot of legacy
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
Normally I'd consider those "Yet Another.." posts trolls, but I think there is something to be said about this.
:-)
The source to Slash hasn't been released in quite a while; it seems slightly fishy that preaching the joys of Open Source gets Slashdot and Andover a lot of money, but the source isn't actually being released. Is this a strategic move for Andover?
If so, it's pretty stupid. Slashdot functionality has been emulated many times over. My personal favorite is SquishDot, a plug-in for Zope. I don't see any competitive advantage to not releasing the source. It's not like releasing the source is that much more work for Rob and crew; we know it's being worked on because of improvements in Slashdot itself...
A lot of people might respond "If you don't like it, leave. You get what you paid for." But this is a web site held by a publicly owned company; we get bombarded by the ads and click through on the banners and generally keep this site funded pretty well. You'd think that
1. in the face of consumer demand for the source (and yes, we are consumers whose click throughs fund slashdot and andover), and
2. in the face of the open source ideology that slashdot promulgates, and
3. in the face of the fact that there is no strategic advantage in delaying the release to Slash because there are so many workalikes
you'd think that Slash source code would be released.
That having been said, I don't particularly mind if the source isn't released because Rob et al are taking their sweet time due to programmer-endemic laziness (as opposed to andover policy and other conspiracy ideas ), but it would be nice to hear status reports on the matter at the very least (e.g., "01-03-2000: Did nothing.")
just an opinion..
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
While there are those who will look at the negative aspects of Inprise's action to release Interbase 6 as open source, I am not one.
Having been an avid IB user since the introduction of Delphi with various versions running on my hardware (IB 5.6 on Windows, 4.02G on Linux) I can hardly wait for 6.0. Delphi and IB for Linux make an awesome team with transactions, isolation, and a rich stored procedure language.
Interbase 6.0 was demonstrated at the Borland/Inprise conference this year. During one of the sessions, a fellow developer asked the pointed question of releasing Local Interbase for free or the creation of a run-time only engine to aid in the deployment of applications developed using Interbase. He cited M$ and Sybase's moves to do such things. They said they would look into it but didn't thing such a move was feasible. IB 6.0 never made it out the door (but it did look slick with that nice GUI admin tool).
But, we also heard Dale Fuller stating that the Interbase team had about six months to turn the corner and that Borland was fully dedicated to Linux. Looks to me like they are positioning themselves quite nicesly.
I just hope that the source will compile with egcs (or at least decent RPMs will be available).
RD
Kindly wipe that Stallmanesque `g' from the name of Mr. Torvald's kernel. It's insulting.
One more thing: open sourcing something does not mean `giving it to Linux'. It means giving it to the whole wide world! Try not to see everything through Linux-colored glasses. I know it's hard, but please, for everyone's sake, do please try.
They've stated that they didn't really set out to do this open source. They got forced into it by their own ineptitude.
Their own public statements are that the whole development management team for Interbase quit last month, that they no longer have the resources to support the product, that they don't feel that this is part of their core business, that they no longer have the technical knowledge of hte product to support it, and therefore they're going to release it Open Source.
So what the community gets is about 15 years of corporate (read: poor quality) code, with no commitment by Inprise to support it at all. And their statements indicate that they don't plan to, as they don't feel that it's part of their core business. Heck, the rumors that I've heard is that there are sections that nobody currently understands, and that are written in K&R style C. This doesn't bode well for the product.
I'm all in favor of open source applications, but considering that this seems like a desperation dump (and I wasn't planning on bringing up Mozilla, but.....), and that there seems to be no thought put into how they're going to actually manage it, I'd rather not have this multi-million line-of-code dump clouding the community's mind.
Kirk
It sounds, from the wording of the press release and the comments of other users here, rather like they decided they couldn't make Interbase 6 into a commercial product so they're taking whatever they have lying around under the IB6 code tree and going to release it as open source rather than let the product line die. So maybe technically it is "Beta" but since there will never be a "final" they can just as realistically just call it "Interbase 6" as they seem to be doing now.
It's also interesting that they say "Open Source" but nothing about "free." Not that I am going to complain too much, it's they're code after all, but I wonder if they're going to still make this a commercial product, just one with source code as part of the package. I'd like to see it free, because I'd like to have a "high-end" database I can deploy in situations where MySQL or PostgreSQL just won't cut it but can't afford to spend the trillions of dollars it would cost to put Oracle in place.
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Well, I didn't mean that nobody uses it anymore, but more along the lines of there's no longer a market for it. Current users still had to support it in their own company environments, but there was basically no further penetration of the market. As far as the three higher-ups leaving, it was because they saw the product for which they were responsible being killed off.
After they left, there was a lot of talk in the community that the product would be opensourced, but there was also a lot of talk that it would just be orphaned. Now, for open source advocates, they think it's a wonderful thing, but a lot of people that I know who still actually have to support these environments believe that this is the beginning of the end for any real support from Inprise.
Like I said, it's embarrassing to see all the cheering over this here -- Inprise isn't making some bold move here, they're just giving away code that they were about to toss into the garbage. For InterBase users, it's like getting a consolation prize ("Well, at least they didn't kill it."), and for the rah rah crowd here, it's like celebrating being handed some refuse that was about to be thrown out (forgetting, of course, that there's a reason why InterBase was on its last legs in the first place, and it wasn't 'cause it was closed source). Yippee.
Bugger: Who is spreading FUD? Are you denying that those people quit? Are you telling me that InterBase was a thriving product? In the future, please quit tossing the word "FUD" around every time you get your panties in a bunch.
Jay Vaughan, who says that "the rest of us [will] take over their product and continue to enhance and improve it in true OpenSource fashion": What, you mean like Mozilla? What is it, almost two years late now? For a browser?? Besides, I recall that after the flop of Mozilla, ESR backpedaled and said that he never claimed that his cathedral utopia would work for closed source products being opened up (Which, of course, begs the question of why he goes around claiming credit for the opening of Mozilla, if his CatB fantasy didn't apply to them, but that's a discussion for another day). What is the difference in this case?
Cheers,
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That could ultimately be the case, but the assertion that they can thus "take a leadership role" is pretty funny. In the free software community, you can't take anything; you can only be a leader by giving away more than anybody else. I suspect they'd find that a mite challenging; it seems to me that IBM's AlphaWorks program is a stronger contender for the status...
The thing that is particularly exciting about InterBase, setting it apart from any of the already-libre options for Linux, is the fact that InterBase was designed as an embedded RDBMS. In the "open source" context, the opening of the code ought to allow the system to be deconstructed into a set of libraries to separate data store from SQL interpreter (to name the most obvious bits) as well as, hopefully, lock manager and transaction manager and probably some other "useful bits." That is very important in that:
- Not requiring much, if any DBA work.
- Putting the database in a few files that should be user-controllable
... Which should make it easier for naive users to install and backup their data ...
It takes some doing to get DBMSes up and running and configured to be usable; InterBase should "lower the bar" on this, which is a very good thing.This is a pretty major issue at present with other DBMSes like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.