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Interbase Fork Imminent?
A reader wrote to us saying: "Technocrat.net has this story about how Inprise is pissing off the developers and users of Interbase, who were creating a vibrant community around the open source RDBMS. As a result, It looks as like the project is about to fork, and the independent branch will be called Firebird."
I realized that it was a joke. I was playing the 'straight-man'.
Sigh. No one appreciates deadpan humor anymore...
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The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
Although Inprise has lost the support of the community, the codebase has not.
The developers are rallying, have set up a separate CVS repository on Sourceforge, and have an extensive set of mailing lists as well.
The group now known as NewCo has been getting a lot of VC interest, and more importantly, a lot of interest from current Interbase customers who want to drop Inprise as their support provider.
There are also several commercial software vendors whose products are based on InterBase, who are also willing to throw their weight behind NewCo.
In short, the codebase is not being abandoned by the only people who really matter, it's users and developers.
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The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
At the time, the gcc maintainer was sitting on an enormous number of patches, mostly contributed by Cygnus. These patches fixed critical problems with g++. Things were so bad at one point that the Cygnus version of g++ was the only version of gcc that could compile my code.
Several people brought this up on USENET. Some time later, the EGCS project was announced. The Cygnus compiler was quickly released more visibly (it had of course always been availble on their FTP site). Development was changed to a bazaar style and improvements quickly rolled in.
About two years later, the FSF finally caught up and decided to roll in the EGCS changes, creating gcc 2.95. Both projects happily merged and all is well in compiler-land.
Forking is probably the most powerful tool we have in the Free Software community. It's akin to booting our elected officials out of office. If handled in a civil manner, it is a useful tool to spur development on a stagnant project.
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This sort of thing sounds a lot like the point I brought up in yesterday's AFS article. Many companies that previously released proprietary only code have been opening things up. This is good, but in many cases the licenses allow them to continue to exert a lot of influence over how things are used (how many IPLs are there now?) I also question the motives behind jumping into open source when a company jumps right back out because the short term prospect of Inprise recouping their investment wasn't too promising. For profit corporations are still tied to their shareholders and they aren't likely to be huge supporters of open source, there just isn't enough money in it right now.
Soon I will be free of my present employer (I maintain several different RDBMSs) and I would like to spend some time working for one of the open source database projects. Things like this piss me off because I would hate to be in the position of the people who have been doing Interbase development (or at least planning to do some).
Icebox
Namely, that you think it's up to someone outside the developers to decide how many projects is enough. "Do we really need..." implies a basic thought flaw. If someone wants to work on a project, or start a new competing project, it's nobody's business but their own. You may as well comment that your neighbor has bought a new stuffed toy for their kid.
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Infuriate left and right
As a serious Borland Delphi developer and staunch Inprise/Borland supporter since 1982, I was really looking forward to the open sourcing of InterBase and the spin off to ISC. My excitement was a direct result of having used InterBase in the past but was turned off to deploying products based on it because of the apparent lack of support by Inprise. Finally, they were taking InterBase seriously.
/. seemed to think the unveiling story wasn't worthy of their time.
But, when the deal to spin off InterBase to ISC failed to materialize at the developer's conference, I began questioning Inprise's motives in the whole affair. At the keynote speeches, we were assured the contract would be signed in a couple of weeks.
Prior to the conference, I asked on the NGs what would become of the code being written by non-Inprise developers if Inprise renigged on the deal. Everyone said I was taking Dale Fuller's statements the wrong way and that Inprise/Borland was committed to the spin off. Even as late as the conference, we were told the delays were in the hinds of the lawyers. Even
Well, as I feared, the deal fell through. Borland is rapidly losing its InterBase developers (well,according to the article). So, what will become of InterBase? Will it lose financial support and whither and die as was its original fate as of last December?
Has Borland dealt itself a final blow in this last fiasco with Open Source developers as well? Did they lose the small footholds of trust they achieved whenever a commercial vendor enters into this arena and makes these promises and almost delivers?
Okay, the source code has been released, but will people use or extend it under the provisions of the IPL?
What impact will these actions have on their aim to become a cross-platform tool vendor and the acceptace of Kylix among Linux-based developers?
I wish, for once, that companies would do what's right for the right reasons rather than what's for the immediate good of their stock holders. The long term effects would have made it all worth while. Now, we'll just have to wait and see what the final outcome will be. I'm betting it won't be good for Borland.
RD
throw us a little dylan thomas, oscar wilde, lord byron, yeats, frost, akhmatova, t.s. eliot....this emily dickinson thing is cute, lets get some variety.
I think whats key here are the open source communities that get behind particular projects or causes. Inprise had a lot anticipation and support from a developer community that really liked their product. But they dropped the ball consistently, by delivering late, and without key adapters. They basically had a goldmine in their potential dev. community and then threw it away by alienating them.
Companies that release there products as open source can learn an important lesson here. Without fostering a community around your product your project will never be a success. For some products, the technical level of the product makes this hard (which can be mitigated by getting some documentation out) and regardless of the size of the community there will generally only be a few core community developers, but if the company doesn't actively foster this by having open mailing lists, core community developers on cvs, project web pages that foster group style dev, bug trackers, etc than the project will never take off and the company will never realize the benefits of making they're product open source. in fact just the opposite, they will incur only costs for the benefit of additional testing.
An example of a company that does develop their community check out zope.org by digital creations. For another example of a company that doesn't check out arsdigita.com (no project site).
my 2 cents... back to work...
Papa Smurf Says "When You Live In A Mushroom Everyone Looks Blue"
...in my mind, had nothing at all to do with the current Inprise/Firebird situation:
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Something I think that has been lost in all this is the effect it will have on Kylix. By day, I'm paid to write windows code and I was really hoping to get in on the 2 for one offered by delphi/interbase on windows and kylix/interbase on linux. I had always considered the open sourcing of Interbase a brilliant move - people would adopt that and then they could pick up the cash selling the best tool to work with interbase. Now if I convince my customer that they don't need Oracle, and then I have to reverse myself becuase of somebody inside Borland doing a power jerk off, I'll be pissed.
In actuality, other than being angry with the dishonesty exhibited by Inprise, how does this materially affect the OSS community? I personally think this will be a huge win. Imagine the discussions that will ensue if the Firebird project outperforms the Inprise led effort, providing better code on a faster track. Once Inprise open sourced the DB, they let the Genie out of the bottle. If Inprise decides they made a mistake, too bad. The point I am trying to make is that collaboration doesn't necessarily need corporate sponsorship. If a project forks because corporate pomp is interfering with development efforts, then I argue that is the best thing that can happen. Inprise needs to remember that they are the newbies when it comes to *this* type of software license, and that they aren't the Grand Poobah of development in the OSS community.
As I mentioned in the article, Inprise can benefit as a 'free rider' for a while, but since contributor code is not under their copyright, the developers can re-license it. This means that as soon as the codebase is composed of contributor code, it could be relicensed under the GPL or some other license, thus removing Inprise's privileged position.
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The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
FIAWOL, because Fandom Is A Way Of Life.
;-)
So, who owns www.fijagdh.com then? If Bruce Perens is associated with FIAWOL, does that mean Brett Glass should own FIJAGDH.COM?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
-- Oh Well
I investigated using Interbase for one of my projects and came away with the distinct impression that the project was in upheaval.
Sign I:
My application needed to access the DB using ODBC, it turned out that the person writing the ODBC drivers (the original inventor of Interbase) refused to finish because Inprise welched on releasing as much of Interbase as they said they would. Currently there is no time frame for when ODBC drivers will be written.
Sign II:
I nprise refused to spin off Interbase into a seperate company as they originally stated and this has troubled the Interbase community.
Sign III:
Inprise was not as forthcoming with GPLing stuff as was expected.
The Queue Principle
Apparently, you do not understand the value of many groups working on similar projects. For example:
Finally, you seem to think that just because software is Free, that means people will cooperate. There are differences in design, implementation, technical leadership. Differences cannot always be overcome 'for the good of the community'. We still are human (thank God), so we differ in our opinions.
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"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
What will the suits see?
Most likely, they won't see 'We alienated the developers, causing the fork.'
They'll probably see 'They took the code and ran.'
Could make companies think twice in the future . . .
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Whom does Larry Wall quote in
This is a situation the open sourcers will have to deal with more and more often as more and different viewpoints and agendas are brought to projects. To some extent this is a side effect of corporations getting involved (any bets on how we'll see GNOME change now that they're sleeping with half the companies in the industry?), but it's mostly caused by the simple expansion of open source and Linux--more users means more programmers, and that means more diversity and more reasons to customize code.
If a codebase is the BASIS for different systems, evolving along different philosophy lines (for example: (theoretically spoken) if interbase A will have it's focus more on distributed computing and if interbase B will be more focussed on central computing with large (real large!) databases than the fork between A and B FROM the basis codebase is a good one IMHO. No cluttered code in either of the codebases to exclude functionality from both philosophies.)
IMHO more OSS projects should fork (or branch, whatever you want to call it) their codebase to clean up the code. The more #ifdef SPECIFIC_DEFINE there are included in a sourcefile, the more it gets unreadable and unmaintainable.
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Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Postgresql may not have outer joins, but at least its developers and copyright holders have respect for their hackers, users, and corporate partners.
I was thinking of getting into Interbase. This certainly dampened my enthusiasm. I will continue to work on Oracle for high-end (really high-end) work, use PostgreSQL for development, and deploy MySQL for data marts. Watching Informix lay off something like 900 people recently, and Sybase clinging to life, I wasn't too surprised at Interbase getting to be a dead end (for now).
Such a drag. The greedheads and day-trading degenerates seem to infect everything these days.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.