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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."
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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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
...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
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
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.