Slashdot Mirror
Inprise Considering Open Sourcing InterBase
Keith Russell writes "Caught this news blurb on ZDNet. Apparently, attrition has taken its toll at on Interbase's top levels, and Inprise is seriously considering open source as an alternative to pulling the plug. A likely possibility, given their recent enthusiasm for Linux. This could be a Good Thing. I'd rather see "end of life" software opened than hoarded. "
First, let's face it: InterBase has never been a wildly successful product. From what I can tell (as a Inprise outsider) the only people who bought it were people who were already firmly entrenched in the Borland development environments.
It seems to me that Borland's real cash cow has always been their development tools. Open sourcing Interbase could lead to it being more widely used, which could sell a /lot/ more development tools. Especially in the Linux environment.
Second, this would firmly entrench Borland in the Linux world. I think that the past few years and the (ridiculous) success enjoyed by Visual Basic have made it clear that it is going to very difficult for Borland to compete on Microsoft operating systems.
There hope of radical success (as opposed to the kind of mediocre success they've been enjoying for a while) is to become the premier provider of Linux tools. And I think they know it.
All in all, this could be very cool.
Also, let me comment that, from what I've seen, Interbase is a very cool product that has never gotten the recognition it deserves. The big advantage over MySQL is that it has full transaction support. Sorry guys: but there are some applications where you just need transactions.
-- Slashdot sucks.
If a company considers that a software package is no longer "profitable", opensourcing should be considered a way of generating advertising at the very least.
Look at all the companies recently who have benefitted greatly in terms of good PR by opensourcing their stuff.
However, this does not necessarily mean that opensourcing software is *always* going to be good PR.
Look at the recent Quake1 debacle.
What should have been (and Is still, in my opinion) a fantastic move has been perverted by whiners complaining that the release of the code has resulted in "iffy clients" or that the Graphix were not released with it.
I think opensourcing should be done in conjunction with the open source community:
Ask if anyone will support it.
Explain exactly what it is you are intending to do.
Don't expect adulation and worship.
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
Russia used this militarily to destroy both French and German armies; they performed strategic retreats when "outgunned," destroying crops and other infrastructure so that when the Russian winter set in, opponents were overextended, and despite "winning the battle," wound up losing the war.
This obviously came at the cost of considerable Russian destruction, and with Inprise, the cost is that of not getting revenues from license sales, whilst the immediate benefit is that this may injure sales of competing DB vendors.
The open question is of how this affects already-free DBs like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Effects on them are severalfold, and some are dependent on what license Inprise comes up with:
- Regardless of the license, it should be useful to have source code access as this can allow folks to see an implementation of transaction locking, stored procedures, SQL-CLI, ODBC, as well as the data storage mechanis, which may be quite useful when they try to add such functionality to other DBMS systems even if there is no reuse of code.
- If the license is sufficiently compatible, it may prove possible to integrate code one way or another either into "OpenInterBase" or into one of the other DBMSes.
Note that the folks likely to get particularly injured by this are the second/third tier companies selling licenses to things like:- Altera
- SOLID SQL Server
- OpenIngres
- Mimer
- Faircom
- Raima
- Yard
- Empress
whilst people will still likely be prepared to "pay the bucks" to move up to "Tier 1" DBMSes like Sybase/Oracle/Informix/DB2If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Another, similar route to open source software is through research projects that, for one reason or another, aren't commercialized; the research code is released and often becomes an important open source/free software system.
We should be happy about that: much (if not most) open source and free software started out that way.
Because so much free software starts out as commercial or research projects that, I think it's important to think about how to encourage development and research organizations to build it in such a way that the transition to free software will be easy. That means that such organizations should find it easy to use existing free software libraries, build on open APIs with free implementations, and should not feel the need to rely on proprietary libraries (which would make freeing the software later much harder).
One thing that I think is very important is to use licenses like LGPL or BSD (as opposed to GPL or QPL) for important libraries. Research and development organizations will not use software if that means making a strong commitment early on to open sourcing their software later or face uncertain expenses later. Both GPL and QPL, unfortunately, impose such uncertainties and limit options. If there is no unencumbered free or open source software, they will pick the best and most affordable proprietary libraries to build on.
The LGPL and BSD licenses, on the other hand, allow development and research organizations to keep their options open for what to do with their code. When infrastructure libraries (standard libraries, networking, gui, etc.) are released under those licenses, research and development organizations can use them, and when they decide to release their software as "free software", it will be so much more useful to the free software community than if it had been based on proprietary libraries or APIs.
For similar considerations, I think it's also important to get as much free software infrastructure on Windows. If companies start programming to free software APIs on Windows (and they have to cover the Windows market), when they go open source, their software will be much more useful to the free software community. So, the more unencumbered networking, database, and GUI libraries we can get onto Windows, the better.
So, keep that in mind when thinking about policies and licenses. While the idea that all free software is created by altruistic volunteers is appealing (and a significant amount of free software is), the reality is that a lot of free software is created by companies and donated if the software turned out not to be a winner in the market or is otherwise not commercializable. Making the life of those companies easier and allowing them to develop code that interoperates well with other free software is a win for everybody.
Just to make it clear this rumor does have some basis in fact:
Anders Ohlsson (Borland) posted this message to a BBS on Wednesday evening:
From The "Save Interbase" Website
Anders Ohlsson is a farily well known Borland Developer.
Have you looked into PostgreSQL? How does it compare to Interbase?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!