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Interbase Fork Imminent?

Posted by Hemos on from the good-times-bad-times-you-know-i've-had-my-share dept.

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."

3 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The irony here is almost unbearable by David+Greene · · Score: 5
    Actually, forking can be extremely useful in some cases. Probably the best example is the gcc/egcs split that happened some years ago.

    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.

    --

    --

  2. It's about time... by Carnage4Life · · Score: 4

    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

  3. The irony here is almost unbearable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4
    This is one aspect of the open source credo that I've always found extremely frustrating, the "don't like it? do it yourself, but don't fork the code base" nonsense. You can't have it both ways. You can't say on one hand that one of the great benefits of open source is the ability to make and distribute custom mods to source, and then condemn people for forking the source code base.

    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.