Paul, IMHO, the major reason for the "decreasing passion" is the (too) long periods of apparent "no activity" that we have between each FB official release. People just get "bored". A new release coming out creates a general "hype" making people excited, feeling that the product is alive and moving forward, and making them curious about the news. With a new release, people have new features to use and to talk about, and the "heat" brings together passion and more action in the forums, lists, sites (new articles being written/posted), tools, etc.
For the view of most users, who don't follow fb-devel, or do not care about checking the SVN commits, etc, the Project is frozen since the release of FB 2.5 (+3 years ago, yes - I'm not counting bugfixes releases). In a epoch where you get browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc) getting major releases several times a year, Delphi getting at last one major release by year and so on, having to wait 4 years for a new major release probably deviates people attention (and passion) to other things. PS: I know our core-developers never stopped working, and that the internal FB 3 changes are heavy and complex, but "standard" users are not aware of this. Btw, probably this went off-topic, so feel free to move the talk to another list or to a private chat. []s Carlos Firebird Performance in Detail - http://videos.firebirddevelopersday.com www.firebirdnews.org - www.FireBase.com.br PV> Hello Carlos, >> This LinuxQuestions poll is even "worse" in such aspect, since not everyone >> uses FB on Linux, and even when they use, most people don't wanna waste 5 >> minutes registering to a site they will not use, just to be able to vote por >> FB. I would say that in the past, Firebird users were more passionate about >> the product. Unfortunately, this seems to not be true anymore (and I could >> list some possible reasons for that). PV> What are they, in your opinion? Maybe we should discuss this in PV> Firebird-general. I, too, have the impression that we used to have PV> more momentum in the past, but maybe that's just me: back then I PV> had much more time, so I contributed more to Firebird, followed all the newsgroups, etc. PV> Cheers, PV> Paul Vinkenoog
