Friday, June 04, 2010

Firebird saga continues What community did without the need for Interbase name and Inprise help

yes is that time when you start digging the Firebird/Interbase history and find the old building tips and source code overview and the battle between community and the corporate brainless drones aka : Inprise at that time : Read InterBase Saga Continues article to see how short minded they were by retreating in the Closed Source Cave

Here is how it was the situation in A.D. 2001


At this time, although the latest source code and CVS tree have been released, some key pieces are still being held by Inprise. These include:



  1. release notes

  2. build instructions and makefiles

  3. build documentation including known bugs list.

  4. the testing suite

  5. the InterBase name

A key issue for the community is the ownership of the documentation. Inprise is the copyright holder to the original documentation, But ISC had commissioned an outside company to update the documentation in anticipation of being transferred the copyright. According to Paul Beach, who was appointed VP of sales and Marketing at ISC, the new documentation is not 'derivative' enough (over 30% different) to allow them to release the new version without violating Inprise's copyright.

Well i will start with bottom up what community did all these years 2000 -> 201x
5. Interbase name : Firebird name is better than InterBase name and Firefox name
4. Testing suite : Is better than original and is written in Python , easier to parse and write for the brain
3. Building is easy these days and is packaged for major linux distros and compilers g++, vc++
2. On my linux i just type ./configure ; make ; make install so all is done for posix systems , win32/64 ok ok we don't have an HaikuOS port but that is easy :)
1. Release Notes : We have plenty

So in the end community filled all the missing gaps and it will finish the All the documentation too , It was a strategic mistake to ignore the community and the power of open source

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