Gadgetopia

Beyond Proprietary Databases: Helen Borrie on the Future of Firebird: Here’s an interesting interview with one of the people behind Firebird, an emerging open-source, multi-platform database server.

It’s a fork of a mature commercial database called InterBase. InterBase is an enterprise-level database — Firebird is the same, but better. You’ll find Firebird behind a number of Web sites, storing records for telecom companies and managing data for point-of-sales systems — just about anywhere you might find Oracle or [Microsoft] SQL Server.

Firebird, you may remember, was the reason that the Mozilla browser project had to change its name to Firefox.