FreeTDS Development Group

[Brian Bruns <camber AT umcc.ais.org>]

On Mon, 8 Feb 1999, Steve Olson wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I originally sent this message to freetds AT metalab.unc.edu, and received a 
> reply from Brian Bruns (included) that suggested I send it to a wider 
> audience.  I hope this is the right to: list.
> 
> In terms of TDS specification, we are prepared to make it available 
> immediately; we are also giving serious consideration to open-sourcing
> dblibrary, client library, and possibly jConnect (our all-java jdbc
> driver).
Wow! This is very exciting news. Please do let us know when and where we
can view the TDS spec. I think the open source community (or at least our
little part of it) can offer alot to Sybase. I have had some plans on
features such as HTTP tunneling and low bandwidth compression, that have
been waiting on more of the basics getting finished. Additionally, you
currently rely on Intersolv for ODBC drivers, which quite frankly performs 
poorly compared with ctlib (understandably since it's one more layer). 
ODBC should be a first class citizen, along with dblib and ctlib.

A whole host of questions are coming to mind regarding the release of
open client source (the name open client would actually be truthful!).
What licenses are you considering? Are you also considering open-sourcing
openserver or parts thereof? Would it be handled like mozilla.org? or some 
other way? How open would Sybase be to improvements to the TDS protocol
where they made sense? Are you hiring? ;)
 
> 
> Your thoughts on how we can help are welcome.
> 
Ideally, I guess and organization like mozilla.org would be good. They
seem to have been very successful with that formula. Of course TDS is a
much more stable beast. 

Cheers,

Brian