Of course, I couldn’t finish this post without guessing (just guesses) the reasons why Firebird SQL is so unpopular if compared to MySQL or PostgreSQL :

1. There’s no big player like Sun /Oracle or IBM supporting it right now.

ED: Not an issue: there is no need for the big Oracle hug, look what they have done to MySQL, OpenOffice, Hudson , they killed or dumped the projects and only community saved them by forking the source code and continuing under some sort of fundation umbrella: Apache, TDF … . Another article that you must read is by Glyn Moody : Has Oracle been a disaster for Sun’s open source?

2. The official website is terrible (http://www.firebirdsql.org). Seems futile, but the first impression of the project is horrible. Makes you think it’s stalled.

ED:This is fixed , site was reworked , check the new design and compare with the old version from archive.org

3. Firebird’s biggest sponsor today is IBPhoenix , which main business IS Firebird. But even it’s website falls in the same problem.

ED This is fixed , site was reworked , check the new design and compare with the old version from archive.org

4. The fact of being Delphi related since it’s beginning.. With Delphi’s decadence, its popularity just floundered with it.

ED : That is solved we do have support for all the other new players : nodejs, rails , django , lua … And Lazarus apps are still the fastest one in benchmarks vs Java, .net …

5.Poor documentation

ED:Soon to be fixed , but more hands are needed , it’s easy to complain , please help to update and fix the bugs in the docs area

Maybe things may change to Firebird SQL after Oracle bought Sun (many MySQL users are getting scared (I see no reason for this by the way)) and may play with Firebird, but it’s something improbable to happen. 🙂

ED:Wind of change : i get more hits on my blog with things like phpbb3 installations , rails installations … and the traffic for FibirebirdSQL.org and FirebirdNews.org is going up, sourceforge download stats are up , also on the linux distro land and bsd side we are going well : packaged and ready to replace LAMP with FLAPS , firebird php driver is included in default php install on Windows

Of course, these are just my opinions about it. I really whould like to know yours. Why do you think so few developers are using Firebird today?