Please join Philippe Makowski, President of Firebird Foundation, and Dmitry Yemanov, lead Firebird developer, at the Launch Webinar devoted to the 5th major release of Firebird. It will take place at October 4, 2010, at 13-00 GMT.

Firebird 2.1 creates databases with an ODS of 11.1. It can read databases of lower ODS but most of its new features will be unavailable to such databases. Firebird 2.1 is a full version release that builds on the architectural changes introduced in the V.2.0 series.

The community project Firebird 2.5 is released. You can read the press release and most importantly release notes. And sure, you can download it and use/test/deploy.

The project team announces that kits of Firebird 2.5.0 release candidate 1 are now available for all the supported main-line platforms . Please test it with your loads and report back to firebird-devel. Note, this is the first of two RC releases.

As Firebird approaches the final 2.5 release, a new campaign is born to help increase Firebird’s visibility and awareness.

Now, this could be a very good opportunity for all of the other open source database servers particularly the most popular ones like Firebird and PostgreSQL. I’m particularly fond of Firebird (the InterBase offspring) and use it in many projects and did a lot of consulting to Delphi developers using it. Can this be the rise of Firebird?

I’d like to clarify some facts about Firebird and Firebird Foundation. I think right now is a correct time to remind how all these things are organized, because some messages about "crisis, firebird's death, low finances" and so on being spreaded around.

Two documents have been added to Firebird documentation area
How the cache works in Firebird :
That is based on information Ann Harrison supplied on the firebird-devel list a while back. She has permitted me to document it and make a manual out of it.
And Firebird Internals :

All major free distro have now latest Firebird stable version (2.1.3) available in their official repositories.

Here is the list of where firebird 2.1.3 is included or can be installed