"News happens 24 hours a day so we need it to go all day, every day," he said. "All development is done on a 166MHz Pentium machine with 64MB of RAM to force you to write good code."

Support is reliable, Weeks said. Firebird's community support is good in that "if you don't get an answer back in 10 minutes, it's a bad day".

"IBPhoenix provides commercial support and also does database recoveries," he said.

Helen Borrie, IBPhoenix Firebird consultant and author of The Firebird Book, said IT departments should consider all the open source database offerings to break free from the "shackles" of commercial products but Firebird's interoperability is a "strong decider".

"The SQL language implemented is highly conformant with the standards [and] its application programming interface is available for all of the popular and upcoming languages and IDEs," Borrie said. "It slips easily into virtually any of the environments where database engines already have a place."