TWe are currently running IB4 on IRIX, unfortunately there seem to be no later releases for this platform.
Bill Karwin::Correct. There has not been an InterBase V5.x release on SGI IRIX.

This leaves us with a choice between NT and LINUX (yet another platform at a time when we are trying to reduce the number of platforms). Suggestions please?
BK::InterBase 5 is also available for platforms Solaris 2.6 on SPARC, HP-UX 10.20 on HP9000 (PA-RISC), Novell NetWare 4.2/5 on Intel, and SCO OpenServer 5 on Intel.
You might be using one of those above already, so you could move your InterBase server to one of these operating systems without adding the number of platforms.
I prefer Solaris on SPARC for a good RISC-based platform.

Ann H::How soon do you need a solution?

Paul Beach::18 months ago or so, InterBase made a number of decisions to reduce the number of ports that we were maintaining, among the ports that we decided not to keep moving forward was SGI Irix. (Other ports included - DG-UX, Digital Unix, Open VMS, 16Bit LIBS, AT&T etc). There were a number of reasons for this.
1. the cost of the ports (and maintaining them) far exceeded any revenue we were getting (at that time).
2. the nature of our customer base had changed significantly from when these ports were originally introduced
3. many of these hardware / OS vendors were also having significant problems defining what their future was going to be, and were not particularly helpful to us.(Compaq especially :) )
So at this moment in time, there are no plans to resurrect these ports to future versions of InterBase (e.g. 6.0), however if anybody out there in the community is interested in porting to any other OS that we do not currently support, please let me know and we will do what we can to help.

J.M.::I presume this is one of the main arguments for open-source. If somebody have e.g. a special computer or operating system they can freely try to adapt the open source program.

We will have to decide between:
1) as we are (IB4 on IRIX), major enhancments to latest version anyone?
2) run IB latest on NT
3) run IB almost latest on Linux
Anyone already made a similiar decision and willing to explain it ?
A.B.::I would change point 3) into 'run IB latest on Linux'. IB 5.6 is available for Linux.
If you have enough memory in the Linux-Server (IB is classic architecture on Linux) go for 3).
C.H.::I'd rather choose LINUX - sorry don't curse me WINNT guys - we have WINNT 4.2 and HPUX IB4.0C (bigger one) and now shortly LINUX IB4.0G for Intranet. Linux once having common with Unix, I'd opt for continuity...
R.C.::I used linux because my test with NT proved to be less than desirable for various reasons, one of which was NT running out of resources all the time.