Category: General news

Heisse Online reports that IBM will release a free (gratis) version of DB2 Express this month. The authors says that it is from a reliable, verified source in IBM. It worked like this: Firebird forced MS to release a free SQLServer (MSDE, later renamed Express) to compete in VB/Delphi space, Oracle had to match with the release of SQLServer2005 and now DB2 has to match Oracle. Isn't it amazing how a determined community can make giants jump?

Read more here

An article posted on SearchOpenSource.com discusses the result of a survey where users had to compare Windows x Linux regarding many aspects, including their differences, strengths and weaknesses.

Firebird is mentioned in the article:

“On the flip side, Windows security IT professional Andy Canfield wrote about two security weaknesses in Linux that he thinks should be addressed.
Canfield is a member of Firebird Foundation Inc., which is a group that supports and advances the development of the open source Firebird relational database engine. He works on the Firebird Relational Database Project and is a long-time SuSE Linux user.”

Article shows how Coverity worked with linux kernel developers in the past sending them patches

“For now, Coverity plans to publish the defect reports on a semi-private Web site so that any developer associated with a particular open source project can examine the list, determine if something actually needs to be fixed, and then create a fix and submit it to the project lead. This is currently the model used by Coverity for the defects they published for the Linux kernel.”

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6146/1/

Alexey (from IBSurgeon) just informed me about a funny link! Register yourself there and let’s populate the “world” with Firebird users!

The government is here to help open source by ZDNet‘s Dana Blankenhorn — Sounds like a win-win-win. Tell me it’s not.
How they will help scanning for security bugs in open source projects (firebird included)

You can now download the slides from Stefan Heymann’s talk “What Developers Should Know about Character Sets, Unicode etc.”.
It was presented at Firebird Conference 2005 .

Dmitri Kovalenko, LCPI wrote about unicode in September issue of The Firebird Developer Magazine:
Working with UNICODE in InterBase/Firebird

Related to unicode is Joel Spolsky’s article The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

Ok, for you guys living in USA, Yahoo is testing a new alert service that is able to retrieve news from RSS feeds and send them direct to your cell phone using SMS. As you probably now, we have RSS in this site (check the sidebar) and so you can use Yahoo Alert service to monitor firebirdnews.org and send you SMS message when something new is posted! Very cool! You can register in Yahoo Mobile using this link.

An article on ComputerWeekly brings more details about the Homeland Security investment of US$ 1.24 million to build a “bug scanner” software to hunt for bugs on Open Source software, including Firebird database.

Business Objects, Cognos, Information Builders Inc., and SAS Institute are setting the standards in BI, according to Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 1Q06." The report cites SAS as having the most comprehensive BI platform in the industry. SAS, of course, is a Firebird user.

Read more here

I saw firebird in the list of targets

“Through its Science and Technology Directorate, the department has
given $1.24 million in funding to Stanford University, Coverity and
Symantec to hunt for security bugs in open-source software and to
improve Coverity’s commercial tool for source code analysis,
representatives for the three grant recipients told CNET News.com.”

http://news.com.com/Homeland+Security+helps+secure+open-source+code/2100-1002_3-6025579.html?tag=nefd.lede