Inprise has made official the spin-off of its InterBase database division into a separate company, which will open the database's source code in an upgrade planned for mid-year.
The new company, InterBase, is headed by InterBase veterans Ann Harrison as president, Paul Beach as vice president of sales and marketing, and Jim Starkey, architectural advisor. It has 27 employees.
InterBase expects revenue from services, support, validation and testing after the release of the open-source InterBase 6.0, said Dale Fuller, Inprise interim president and CEO.
"We're the very first commercially available SQL database product in the world to be open-sourced," Fuller said this week.
Hopes pinned on Linux
InterBase 6.0 will support Windows platforms, as well as Solaris and HP-UX. However, Fuller expects a growing share of the business to derive from InterBase's support for Linux, the open-source operating system.
"It's where the growth in the market is today. We see it as a tremendous growth vehicle," Fuller said.
Inrprise also expects that the open-source InterBase will broaden distribution and boost sales for Inrprise's development tools and application server.
InterBase will continue to sell and support its current database, InterBase 5.6.
