Derek Fountain wrote:
I accept the moral argument. That wasn't such a nice thing for them to do. On the other hand, it is a fairly generic term which you presumably borrowed from Pontiac, or possibly the football team.
No - it comes from the history of the Firebird project. It was never a question of 'Oh let's dream up a nice name'. It came out of a bitter struggle with another corporate that didn't think we mattered. Borland owned InterBase and decided that it wasn't profitable enough so they decided to can it. The InterBase community weren't happy to see the software they'd built businesses around being treated in such a cavalier manner. A deal was done that involved open sourcing the code amongst other things, but Borland even managed to back track on that. They did open source the code but did not back a commercial entity to kick start the development process. They did the dirty on us twice in the space of nine months and we were not happy. The InterBase code was immediately forked and the Firebird name chosen because it truly represented the return to life from the ashes of the InterBase debacle. Also, it was not used as the name of any other international software project at that time (July 2000.) We were not so dumb as to choose the name Phoenix - it was quite obviously the name of the BIOS owners and choosing it would have courted the same trouble that Mozilla are in now. I'm not going to discuss your other points - I think it is great that everyone can share their opinions on this, but I just want to restrict my contributions to keeping the facts straight. Paul -- Paul Reeves http://www.firebirdsql.org