Why is Firebird not as popular as MySQL?


As you probably learned, Firebird is more mature, has more features, doesn't cost a dime and sure looks more enterprise ready. How come not so many people have heard about it?


The reasons are simple:

1. Firebird doesn't have a unique commercial entity that drives the development and earns money from it. There are companies, but none of them profit from selling Firebird licenses (as Firebird is completely free). They sell support, but the turnaround is much less.

Therefore, there is nobody to push the money into marketing and create a hype around the project. Similar problem plagues other open source projects like Postgres for example.

2. At the time of web server and web application boom, Firebird wasn't ready to be a web server database backend. As demand for data storage grew, people were demanding something easier and faster than Perl-parsed flat textual files. MySQL was simply in the right place at the right time. Soon, each ISP had PHP and MySQL support and the LAMP platform was conceded. As it often happens, those first on a new market quickly take it over, and it's really hard for others to take that marketshare away.


Do you find this FAQ incorrect or incomplete? Please e-mail us what needs to be changed. To ensure quality, each change is checked by our editors (and often tested on live Firebird databases), before it enters the main FAQ database. If you desire so, the changes will be credited to your name. To learn more, visit our add content page.



All contents are copyright © 2007-2024 FirebirdFAQ.org unless otherwise stated in the text.


Links   Firebird   News   FlameRobin   Powered by FB: Home Inventory   Euchre  
Add content   About  

Categories
 Newbies
 SQL
 Installation and setup
 Backup and restore
 Performance
 Security
 Connectivity and API
 HOWTOs
 Errors and error codes
 Miscellaneous