Firebird supports software for patents!

but firebird does not support patents for software! just kidding 🙂

The reason why i wrote this is because on the firebird conference i was informed by a visitor about http://www.epoline.org. He is working for one of the largest german patent lawyer companies that uses the firebird server since a long time already. Their main database has about 400GB of patent informations. Epoline ist the official software required by European Patent Office for submitting patents in all European Countries. He expects that there about 23000 patent lawyer in the EU who must use this software to submit patents. It can be downloaded for free from http://www.epoline.org (about 170MB) and it does install and use the firebird server 1.5. With this information we now know that there are at least 23000 additional firebird installations in Europe. I will try to get some more background informations from the people behind this software.

This infomation might be useful for discussions regarding firebird reference users.

See you on next firebird conference in 2008 or on the firebird 2008 world bbq tour

Holger Klemt
www.firebird-conference.com