COMMERCE AND CONTROVERSY

A Russian RDBMS guru who walked away from Open Source now champions Yaffil, a commercial variant of Firebird.

by Nancy Cohen
April 11, 2003
     
  Firebird, an open source database project, was the subject of last month's story, “War and Pieces.”  Firebird has garnered an enthusiastic cadre of developer support for over two years now. After catching our attention, we discovered a uniquely human saga of a Borland spin-off that never happened and a group of developers who remained steadfast and introduced their own InterBase variant, Firebird. If that wasn’t enough, along came a commercial variant of Firebird, called Yaffil, which was quickly talked about in newsgroups as something to watch.

Firebird project doyenne, Ann Harrison, on being asked if the project’s members were bothered by this commercial variant, answered in the positive and the negative: “Some of the people on the project are upset by Yaffil. I’m not one of the people who are upset.” She said that Yaffil developers had a perfect right to charge money for their product as long as they published the interfaces.

She also said one should look at Russia’s economic realities. She noted that “The Yaffil group believe they can build a business on software priced below the shipping costs of software in the west, which makes the phrase ‘exploited for commercial gain’ seem overly strong.” Harrison also pointed out that the Yaffil developers “think that publishing their ideas will allow someone else to sell an even cheaper version of their software and cut into their market.”

 
         
  What do Yaffil’s supporters say about their achievements, and where Yaffil is headed? Why did they walk away from Open Source? This week, Open turns to the key Yaffil promoter and supporter, Dmitry Kuzmenko. He talks about why and how Yaffil took hold on the Russian circuit as a product unto itself. While Yaffil is a distinctly ‘Russian’ server—with its Ukrainian and Baltic character sets, with its tailored pricing for the Russian market, with its Russian language-only site—Kuzmenko’s report on his beloved Yaffil nevertheless reveals a useful snapshot about RDBMS development in a distinctly Russian business environment.

Some outsiders who can’t easily translate your Russian-only site may have a difficult time understanding where Yaffil is like Firebird and where it is distinctly different. One reference outside your site describes it as a “Firebird fork, optimized for Windows.” Was Yaffil actually born of Firebird?

Kuzmenko: Yes. We took Firebird’s sources. Now, as you know, Firebird is moving in its own direction, and taking code from C to C++. [Firebird’s project members decided to convert code to C++.] That’s not our goal at Yaffil. Yaffil’s source code is still in C, but we still share information with Firebird about bugs and new features.

 

Judging Yaffil
“I see a lot of us in Yaffil. And like us, they are trying to find a way forward. They have done some smart things particularly in relation to win32. I understand their need to find a financially viable option to be able to continue their work, and hope they can find an option that enables them to return to an open source model of development which would then work in better with us.”
Mark O'Donohue, Firebird lead developer

I've heard of it [Yaffil] but I don't have an opinion of it. Personally, I wish they would just join forces with the Firebird team but they certainly have the right to fork and do their own thing too. I am open and willing to assist in making IBO just as usable with it as I am Firebird and InterBase.”
Jason Wharton, creator of IB Objects

“I would love to see the Yaffil fork united under the umbrella of the Firebird project. To me, it has never made sense for Yaffil to be separated from its parent.”
Helen Borrie, Firebird project administrator and member of the Firebird SQL Foundation

Source: From interviews appearing in InterBase World

 
     
  That raises another question, on whether or not you’re violating the Interbase Public License, which is the license used by the Firebird project.

Kuzmenko: No, not really. Historically, the decision to make Yaffil commercial began when we looked at the Firebird project and asked, what will its future be? Will Firebird survive without financing? OK, open source is a good thing, but most developers here want to use RDBMS, not develop it. So we tried to find out just what we could do with the InterBase Public License, and how to prevent the product from being copied by some other company or group of developers. We publish Yaffil source code periodically, but it can't be compiled because we do not make some of our proprietary modules and makefiles public.

Do you see Yaffil at some stage turning back to an open source model?

Kuzmenko: Companies here want insurance from other companies, not from a group of developers. For example, a lot of people ask us for an official paper to enable them to use Firebird. Presenting a license in a text file is not enough for them. And, in that context they do not care whether sources are open or not.

 
  Do you violate the IPL?

Kuzmenko: We neither violate nor wish to violate the IPL. But, we also have some proprietary work. Maybe, if you look in Yaffil’s source, you'll find some missing code that must exist under the IPL’s requirements. If so, it would happen purely by accident, because there is no legal (exact, juridical) translation of IPL from English to Russian. This is not a problem, though—just ask us, and we’ll fix published sources. But our customers never ask us about source code, really. They don't care. They just want Yaffil to work stable and to be functional.

How did Yaffil development start to pick up speed?

 
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Kuzmenko: Yaffil started out in Spring of 2001 as a project where some performance ideas, like disabling the database file cache, were tested. Later, some parts of the code were rewritten for speeding up the index search, sorting, for garbage collection, and so on. Since there were no ideas to release the test version on all platforms, changes were made only for the Windows version. People began using it and Yaffil became popular. SuperServer was first. Next, came Classic, reconstructed for Windows. The latest entry is Yaffil Personal, which is a DLL for single-user applications.

What is your business relationship with iBase, and how does iBase support Yaffil? I’ve read that iBase first started out as Yaffil resellers but are now much more?

Kuzmenko: I am director of iBase. consulting and software resellers such as Borland, Microsoft, CA. We do many things for Yaffil, like hosting, design, pricing, and so on. We provide consulting and training services for Interbase, Firebird and Yaffil.

Where do you want to take Yaffil? Will you still be concentrating on the Eastern European/Russian marketplace or do you have a global roadmap?

Kuzmenko: We do not have a global roadmap. We have a Russian-only language site and documentation. We don’t plan on English-language resources, as we are not planning to sell Yaffil outside Russia.