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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. "
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.