Senior VP and CTO of AMS: Mozilla Firebird is a Tier 1, Best of Breed Open Source ApplicationSaturday February 7th, 2004Blake writes: "The Senior VP and CTO of IT consulting business AMS has written an article for CIO.com casually identifying Mozilla Firebird as a tier 1, 'best of breed' open source application with the likes of Linux and Apache: "'The first category, Tier 1, consists of "Best of Breed" open source offerings. This category includes products like Linux, the Apache Web Server, Samba, the Mozilla Firebird browser, and the Perl scripting language. These products, widely tested and largely believed to be virtually risk-free, are commonly chosen for their technical strengths. Most consider these products to be safe, and many companies today use them with few problems. In fact, many consciously choose such products over commercial proprietary alternatives regardless of price.'" Personally, I'd put Mozilla Firebird in Tier 2, after all it's [almost] only 0.8. "Tier 2 consists of somewhat lesser-known products that have achieved a large degree of recognition for their quality. One example is MySQL, a database that frequently competes with powerhouses like Oracle and SQL Server. Other examples include Jboss, CVS and OpenOffice. In most cases, stable releases are available with accompanying documentation, and in many cases, support and other services often are available. However, not all of these products have achieved dominance or technical superiority over commercial proprietary competitive products. Some users of open source follow the rule of thumb that if you can buy a book on the product from Amazon.com or a similar bookseller, it's probably mature enough to use within the organization. If software in this category suits your needs best, it may be worth considering." Mozilla Firebird is 0.8 but shared most of its code on Mozilla 1.6. So it's over version 1 for me. I've used Mozilla long way before 1.0 and firebird is a stable and mature product to me. OK, its UI is changing a little bit. But Windows's UI is also changing. I suspect it's considered "tier 1" because it's as good as or better than the best known of the closed-source competition. If you look at tier 1 products, they are generally as good as or better than the alternatives - Apache is better than IIS, Linux is better than (many) proprietry unicies, Perl is better than (what? Applescript? VB?) and so on. The tier 2 products are generally good, but not up to the level of their closed-source conterparts e.g. Openoffice isn't as featureful as Microsoft Office and MySQL is inferior to Oracle or MS SQL server (although I've heard that both Postgre and Firebird-the-DB are better than MySQL). If this is indeed the classifcation scheme, then it's pretty obvious why Firebird is considered Tier 1. Yet again we have someone from the business community misunderstanding open source licenses. "By modifying the code without reading the licensing terms carefully, for example, you could put your organization in a situation where your "proprietary" software is no longer proprietary." That's simply not true. If you're in violation of a license, it does not apply, and standard copyright does instead. Under standard copyright, you would have to stop using the code, negotiate a new license with the copyright holders, or comply with the original license. You never, ever, have to release your own code as open source. It's simply an option. Good to hear some good corporate acceptance of Mozilla Firebird. This is good news for mozilla.org, now knowing they are headed in the right direction, while still carying on with the suite for those who still need it. Firebird is still only in Beta, and this guy deems it stable enough to be considered a "tier 1" application. Great work! :-) |