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Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL
standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety
of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency,
high performance, and powerful language support for stored
procedures and triggers. It has been used in production
systems, under a variety of names since 1981.
Firebird is completely free of any registration, licensing
or deployment fees. It may be deployed freely for use with
any third-party software, whether commercial or not.
In July 2000, Borland Software Corp. (formerly known as
Inprise) released the beta version of InterBase 6.0 as open
source. The community of waiting developers and users preferred
to establish itself as an independent, self-regulating team
rather than submit to the risks, conditions and restrictions
that the company proposed for community participation in
open source development. A core of developers quickly formed
a project and installed its own source tree on SourceForge.
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Because Borland's open source efforts regarding
InterBase never really took off beyond prime release of
the source code and the company returned its focus to closed
commercial development, Firebird became THE Open Source
version of InterBase. The original Firebird 1.0 release
was basically the InterBaseŽ 6.0 engine released by Borland
with a lot of bug fixes and some improvements. This was
then followed by a major release of Firebird 1.5 in October
2003 which added significant new functionality to the database
engine. Work is now progressing on releasing Firebird 2.0.
Firebird has been successfully built and runs on a large
number of platforms from Windows and Linux to MacOS X (Darwin),
FreeBSD and OpenBSD, HP-UX, AIX and others as well.
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