Helen Borrie from Firebird, winner of the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards Best Project for the Enterprise category, answers our questions.
What made you choose to make your project open source?
The choice was made for us. The Firebird relational database management system was developed from the initial open sources from InterBase 6, released by (then) Inprise Corp. back in 2000.
What does your development environment (OS, IDE, etc.) look like?
Firebird is compiled for multiple OS platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, and several Unixes. The development environments vary according to platform and architecture. The project has developers (who develop Firebird), developer users (who integrate Firebird as the RDBMS back end to their products), and end users (who use those third-party products). Included in the middle group are many third-party tool developers who create administrative tools for Firebird databases. Those who build and deploy integrated business products typically ship their own admin interfaces.
How long did it take you to develop your project and how many people contributed to it?
Firebird has been in constant development since its first day, 29 July 2000. It has undergone many major architectural changes, feature enhancements, and new versions since then. Older versions get continued support: only the initial v.1.0.x series from 2001-2 is no longer supported.
Over the years there have been many contributors, both to core code development and to platform support, as well as to the associated driver subprojects. That continues. The core team members put in long hours and set high standards.
Firebird is free and its licensing allows users to use and deploy it without incurring any fees. Thus, it brings us no revenue. We set up the Firebird Foundation in 2002 as a way for Firebird to gather funding for the project by enabling businesses to return cash to the project in return for the obvious benefits. Considering the compass of sites and widely deployed products worldwide that use Firebird, we have an alarmingly small number of cash sponsors and Foundation members. Currently the Foundation makes regular cash grants to seven of its key players.
How many open source projects have you worked on? What is your favorite?
Only Firebird and one other. Firebird is obviously my favorite.