Did you noticed there are very few open source OLE/DB providers? MySQL only has one, and not maintained since 2001. It started as a commercial project and only later (L)GPL'ed.
There is one open source for Inteerbase: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iboledb/
The reason for this, IMHO, is because it isn't easy programming and it doesn't make sense for most of the major languages exactly for the difficulty in making it work right. It's easy to just use the native language wrappers for this, but that will not work in other languages (or even different frameworks, like VCL/MFC).
If you think my "business plan" is not fair, I would be pleased to ear any alternatives you might have to make it better.
An alternative businessplan you can consider, could be like Marco Wobben has with the DBXpress-driver.
You can give it for free, but ask money for the source-code.
When it works good, I guess you can sell some of your source-codes.
You could also have restrictions on the binary only version, for example, not to use for commercial projects.
Maybe I would be the source-code, just for not being dependant to someone else for a critical driver in my software projects.
I am glad I bought the source code from Marco Wobben, because he does not want to do some small changes I need.
Regards Bert Verhees
Best regards, ~Nuno Lucas
