It's official now, Philippe Makowski is the maintainer of Firebird packages for Fedora and Epel (Centos and RHEL packages). Firebird packages get pushed into the official Fedora repositories so the good news is that Firebird users can get Firebird 2.1.2 directly from there. Philippe's blog Flamerobin and Kinterbasdb (the Python driver for Firebird) will follow soon, as will the PHP module.
Tsutomu Hayashi has opened a new project, developing a benchmarking application for Windows (initially), to benchmark Firebird against (initially) MySQL. A beta is available — visit the project.
The GNU Gatekeeper project (GPL license), a free H.323 gatekeeper that forms the basis for a free VOIP telephony system, has added a Firebird driver to its back-end options.
Oracle announces it will buy Sun Microsystems. Another open source database (MySQL) joins the heap that Oracle has been buying up. "If you can't beat it, buy it!"
Thanks to Tsutomu Hayashi his build, released today, of Firebird 2.0.5 Classic for the Solaris 10 SPARC platform.
Thanks, too, to the IBPhoenix build team for ironing out the wrinkles in the Firebird 2.1.2 Classic build for MacOSX on PowerPC and releasing it.
Kits for Windows were all replaced today to include some components that were missing. The new kits have the infix "-1" or "_1" after the build number, e.g. "Firebird-2.5.0.23247_1_Win32_Beta1.exe".
The Firebird Team is pleased to release the first Beta of Firebird 2.5, feature-complete and ready to field-test. Kits are available for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Linux. So — please test it well and report your experiences (good or bad) to the Firebird-devel list. Do make a point of studying the release notes (available on-line and also in the download kits). Note also that there are a few known issues, particularly for those of you who are going to hammer this hard.
Firebird ADO.NET Data Provider v.2.5.0 Beta 2 for .NET 3.5/2.0 is ready for testing.
Transcripts of the presentations from the 2008 Firebird Conference in Bergamo, Italy, are now available for free download. Registration required first.