We are very pleased to announce the formation of "The FirebirdSQL Foundation", a non-profit association with the objectives of supporting and advancing the development of the open source FirebirdSQL relational database engine.

Since the Firebird project's inception in July-2000, the possibility of setting up a non-profit organisation for raising and channelling funds has been discussed.

In late June 2002, a number of us started to pursue this option seriously. The legal formalities for setting up a non-profit association have taken several months, a process that resulted in our 'steering group' establishing the aims and rules for the new Foundation. During this time the steering group members have also pursued the objectives of the Foundation on an informal basis.

Progress so far has been good. The basis of the Foundation involves raising funds from membership dues ($300USD per year) and other activities, and directing them toward funding development. With an initial group of some 15 people and advice from various other members of the Firebird community, the FirebirdSQL Foundation has over the last four months, been able to provide a grant, funding Dmitry Yemanov to support his excellent work in the project, - and we have the capacity to continue funding that grant for at least another year.

Recently the Foundation has accepted sponsorship offers from IBPhoenix and Atkin & Associates. This has raised our funding level for the current year over 12,000USD enabling us to also grant some funding to Alex Peshkov for some Fb 1.5 development tasks and to Claudio Valderrama for the task of reviewing code changes.

Targeting Dmitry, Claudio and Alex as the initial recipients of grants in no way diminishes our appreciation of the extraordinary efforts of all others who participate in Firebird. We would like to also emphasize that our grants do not compensate Dmitry, Claudio and Alex at anywhere near the commercial rates they would normally command and they too deserve our appreciation for their extraordinary efforts. However we hope the grants will allow our grantees to devote time to Firebird, and that all others involved in Firebird will get some benefit from seeing our project proceed due to their work.

The Foundation would like to expand its support to other Firebird development activities that we consider need our attention. As our current priority we would like to raise enough additional funds, through increased membership and sponsorship, to provide grants in the following areas:

1. Quality Assurance/Testing
We would like to provide a grant to progress the development and refinement of the automated test suites based on the original InterBase TCS suite, and the new QMTest suite developed by Pavel Cisar.

and

2. Security Audit & Enhancements
We would like to provide a grant to allow a person to participate in a security audit of the Firebird codebase, and most importantly, to enable that person to fix any issues raised during the audit.

So if you or your company are users of Firebird and get some benefit from the work done thus far, or if you are a potential user and our work is likely to be of benefit in the future, please consider becoming a FirebirdSQL Foundation member, or becoming a sponsor, or making a donation, and help us to progress this important work.

More information about the Foundation and information on how to join can be found at:

http://www.firebirdsql.org/foundation/


Yours Sincerely

The FirebirdSQL Foundation Steering Committee

Gary T. Benner, Helen Borrie, Lucas Franzen, Frank Ingermann,
Aage Johansen, Sean Leyne, Mark O'Donohue, Andreas Pohl,
Phil Shrimpton, Thomas Steinmaurer, Karsten Strobel, Martijn Tonies,
Svein Erling Tysvaer, Claudio C. Valderrama, Jason Wharton,
Geoff Worboys, Dmitry Yemanov