What open source software do you use?
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Firebird[^] is the only open source software I use and it's only because there is no commercial equivalent that meets our requirements for a product we are developing. It's the only serious database product that is commercial friendly licensed, stable, modern and most importantly small enough to distribute over the internet with our app. We actually donated for it because it goes against everything I stand for to not give back to programmers that put effort into producing something of quality. Otherwise we normally avoid open source for components for our commercial software due to: philosophy, the licensing issues and the fact that as a serious software company with many thousands of people relying on our software globally to run their business we need a company we can contact if there is any problem and know that they have a vested interest in fixing that problem. People always say things like "well if you have the source code then there are no worries you can just modify it to fix the problems". Those people have never published any serious level of software, there is just no time to mess about fixing a database driver, you need something that works and can plug in so you can concentrate on what you do best. Or people say things like "well there are literally hundreds of developers all over the world that are working to improve it all the time". That's just complete crap. Every open source project starts out with high hopes and enthusiasm, but human nature quickly takes over and people start to drift off with no real livelihood incentive to keep at it for the long haul. Take a look at all the orphaned projects on sourceforge, it's amazing how many there are. Long lists of bugs or suggestions that are years old and no activity at all. There are very few open source projects that have any kind of long term future and of those that do, most are only there because of the extremist philosophy of the people driving the project. I don't like nor will I support extremist people or their nutty philosophies. (I.E. Richard Stallman etc) Anyone can make really cool flashy unique software, but the real work begins after the release as many of us know and there is no substitute for potential bankruptcy to keep your nose at the grindstone.
"A preoccupation with the next world pretty cle
Yeah, FireBird is great :cool: 'A programmer ist just a tool which converts caffeine into code'