What is the Firebird Database?
The original Firebird 1.0 release was basically the InterBase® 6.0 engine released by Borland with a lot of bug fixes and some improvements. This was then followed by a major release of Firebird 1.5 in October 2003 which added significant new functionality to the database engine. Work is now progressing on releasing Firebird 2.0.
The InterBase source code was originally released by Borland under the InterBase Public Licence, a variant of Mozilla Public Licence (MPL).
About Firebird, InterBase's successor
Firebird has been successfully built and runs on a large number of platforms from Windows and Linux to MacOS X (Darwin), FreeBSD and OpenBSD, HP-UX, AIX and others as well.
Firebird 1.5 introduced a number of significant new features, as well as excelling in how bugs (and some bugs always appear in any piece of software) are handled. As in any other Open Source project, the whole development process is transparent to everyone, so you know the exact state of a bug that you have reported (or anyone else's for that matter), when it's fixed and how it was fixed, and the download the fixed version of the software as soon as it is available. Although bugs are found and fixed by development team on a regular basis, you too can have an influence on the development process, by providing your feedback, your assistance or helping to finance the work.
The Firebird development team doesn't just concentrate solely on bug fixes, but it also adds new features and improvements as well. Because Firebird developers are also Firebird everyday users, they are focused on features and improvements that really "scratch an itch", rather than on features for features sake like you find in many commercial products.
Next: The Firebird Project