Slashdot Mirror

theodp writes: As the press digs for details on Clinton Foundation donations, including a reported $26+ million from Microsoft and Bill Gates, it's probably worth noting the interest the Clintons have developed in computer science and the role they have played — and continue to play — in the national K-12 CS and tech immigration crisis that materialized after Microsoft proposed creating such a crisis to advance its 'two-pronged' National Talent Strategy, which aims to increase K-12 CS education and the number of H-1B visas. Next thing you know, Bill is the face of CS at the launch of Code.org. Then Hillary uses the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) conference to launch a Facebook, Microsoft, and Google initiative to boost the ranks of female and students of color in CS, and starts decrying woeful CS enrollment. Not to be left out, Chelsea keynotes the NCWIT Summit and launches Google's $50M girls-only Made With Code initiative with now-U.S. CTO Megan Smith. And last December, the Clinton Foundation touted its initiatives to engage middle school girls in CS, revamp the nation's AP CS program, and retrain out-of-work Americans as coders. At next month's CGI America 2015, the conference will kick off with a Beer Bust that CGI says "will also provide an opportunity to learn about Tech Girls Rock, a CGI Commitment to Action launched by CA Technologies in partnership with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America that helps girls discover an interest in tech-related educational opportunities and careers." On the following days, CGI sessions will discuss tech's need for a strong and diverse talent pipeline for computer and information technology jobs, which it says is threatened by "the persistent poor performance of American students in science, technology, engineering, and math," presenting "serious implications for the long-term competitiveness of the U.S. economy." So what's the long-term solution? Expanding CS education, of course!

snydeq writes "Security researchers have spotted the Zeus botnet running an unauthorized command and control center on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing infrastructure. This marks the first time Amazon Web Services' cloud infrastructure has been used for this type of illegal activity, according to threat researcher Don DeBolt. The hackers got onto Amazon's infrastructure by hacking into a Web site hosted on Amazon's servers and then secretly installing their command and control infrastructure."

Gandalf_the_Beardy writes in with news that's been around a while but is getting more attention lately. Last month Benjamin Googins, a security researcher at CA, determined that Sears Holding Corp. installed ComScore spyware without adequate disclosure. Sears said, yes we tell people about tracking their browsing. On Jan. 1 spyware researcher Ben Edelman weighed in, noting that Sears' notice occurs on page 10 of a 54-page privacy statement, and twits Sears because its installation identifies the software as "VoiceFive" and later claims it's coming from a company called "TMRG, Inc." even though a packet sniffer confirms the software belongs to ComScore, adding "These confusing name-changes fit the trend among spyware vendors."

jimbojw writes "In a recent security advisory Fortinet is reporting that due to Blogger's popularity, hackers have started to embed malicious scripts on some blogs. 'These scripts have shown up on hundreds of Blogger.com sites. In some cases, a variant of the Stration mass mailer is responsible for directing traffic to the Blogger.com sites.' CNET reports on the situation, quoting an unnamed Google representative as saying 'These are not legitimate blogs that were compromised. They appear to be deliberately set up to promote phishing, which is against our terms of service. We are investigating, and blogs found to include malicious code or promote phishing will be deleted.' The blogs in question use meta or JavaScript redirection to push traffic to a phishing or malware site. Links to the blogs are subsequently mass-mailed by infected visitors — typically via worms in the Stration family. We can only hope that this will not cause Google to remove Blogger.com's templating engine — which is both a source of its strength, and a potential liability as illustrated by these recent attacks."

OSCON 2005 was held in a convention center this year, instead of a hotel, because it just got too big (2000+ people). Too big, in fact, for pudge and myself to cover more than a fraction of the talks and the ideas flitting around the hallways. But here's some of what I found cool last week. And if you attended or presented at OSCON and want to tell us about all the neat stuff we missed, please, share your thoughts in the comments, or submit a fact-rich writeup and we'll maybe do a followup story later.

Mike Shaver's talk on writing Firefox extensions was packed to the walls. If you've been wanting to try it, Firefox 1.5 makes development easier, and should be out soon, so now's a good time. This talk and the tutorial on Ajax persuaded me to start using the DOM Inspector and debugging some JavaScript to get a better understanding of webpage manipulation.

Aaron Boodman's talk on his extension Greasemonkey was a walkthrough of writing a simple GM user script, a discussion of what's coming up, and some Q&A. Greasemonkey 0.5 ("Now With Security!") is in beta: there are multiple security changes that suggest someone really has sat down and thought the whole model through. GM works with Firefox, Seamonkey, Opera, and Windows MSIE (but not, oh please somebody correct this oversight, Safari).

Ruby on Rails is hot; if you want to develop a web app quickly you can't ignore it. It stresses "convention over configuration" with reasonable defaults. The tutorial went from installation to the "hello world" of the web, a blog (!), in a few hours. Anyone have a real-world example of Rails scaling to a large project and lots of traffic?

DarwinBuild is an open-source project from Apple that aids in building the open-source components of Darwin/Mac OS X. Given a build number of Mac OS X, it will fetch and build the software for that version, allowing you to modify the source as needed, making it easy for any developer to modify everything from the kernel to various utilities (just remember to reapply the modifications after running Software Update, if necessary). You can read more about it from, in addition to the web site, the presentation slides.

Google and O'Reilly gave out the 2005 open source awards, with $5000 attached to each. Congratulations to the winners.

Tony Baxter's Shtoom is a cross-platform VoIP client and software framework, written in Python, for writing your own phone applications.

Novell is still moving its employees from Windows to Linux, which we first heard at last year's OSCON. The migration from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice is complete, and the big step, from Windows to Linux, is 50% complete, projected to be 80% by November. Miguel de Icaza gave flashy demos of some Linux desktop applications that didn't impress this cynical observer very much.

PlaceSite is an open-source project looking to bring physical proximity awareness to Internet access at coffeeshops and other meetingplaces: think "local-only Friendster" and you're not far off. They got feedback from a monthlong trial earlier this year and are working on a new version that will be easy to deploy. Could be neat.

In a great 2-hour session on Wednesday, we got to hear from representatives of four leading open source databases about what they've been working on lately. Here are the summaries...

Ingres r3 has an impressive list of big features. Ingres was just open-sourced by Computer Associates this summer, and it's gotten a lot of attention for being a full-featured enterprise database. Ingres supports table partitioning that can be either range-based or hash-based, which can greatly improve performance in many cases. Its optimizer can now come up with parallel execution plans, which can be useful even on single-CPU machines and non-partitioned tables. There's also federated data storage (one can access data stored in another RDBMS through Ingres) and replication. And they're working on a concurrent access cluster, to allow data to be manipulated not just by multiple threads on one machine, but multiple machines.

A side note: Computer Associates was invited by O'Reilly to talk about its recently open-sourcing Ingres. Its representative, while confessing that introducing a new license was "probably the wrong thing to do," said that other licenses wouldn't have worked for them (the GPL "was seen as viral"). The one question that the audience had time to ask was "is Ingres a dump" -- is CA making it open-source to transfer the responsibility of support from the company to the community? The three-part "no" answer was that there are more CA developers working on Ingres now, that Ingres is at the core of their new releases, and that they've sponsored a "million-dollar challenge" to foster community interest. Time will tell I guess.

Firebird 2.0 has been in alpha since January and a beta is expected soon. Since 2000 much of their development has been aimed at making the product easy to install, and making the code easy for a distributed group of developers to work on. This year they're building features on that groundwork. Their design includes 2-phase commits (since the beginning), cooperative garbage collection (as a transaction encounters unneeded data, it removes it) and self-balancing indexes. Backup has been improved. When 2.0 gets to beta, I'm going to check this out, it sounds like very interesting technology (and apparently it will install with four clicks!).

MySQL 5.0 is in beta, and has been feature-frozen since April. Back in 4.1, its abstracted table-type has been put to advantage with odd engines like Archive (only insert, no update); Blackhole for fast replication; and an improvement to MyISAM for logging (allowing concurrent selects with inserts-at-table-end). Their Connector/MXJ lets you run a native MySQL server embedded inside a Java application. In 5.0 we're seeing stored procedures per the SQL:2003 standard, triggers, updatable views, XA (distribution transaction), SAP R/3 compatible server side cursors, fast precision math, a federated storage engine, a greedy optimizer for better handling of many-table joins, and an optional "strict mode" to turn some of MySQL's friendly nonstandard warnings into compliant errors. And they're working on partitioning, ODBC, and letting MySQL Cluster's non-indexed columns to be stored on disk.

PostgreSQL 8.1 is expected to be released in November or December, after a feature-freeze in July -- and it's an impressive list of new features. Their optimizer will make use of multiple indexes when appropriate, which is pretty darn exciting. The recommendation will be that in most cases it will be most efficient to have only single-column indexes and let the optimizer figure out which combination to use. They're implementing a 2-phase commit, they're bringing the automatic vacuum into the core code, and they removed a global shared buffer lock so they're now getting "almost linear" SMP performance scaling. I've never felt the need for Postgres, but I'm definitely going to look at 8.1.

Anil Kandangath writes "Last year, Computer Associates open sourced their Ingres DMBS and they also announced a $1mn bounty for open source conversion toolkits from other databases to Ingres. Well, the toolkits are up on SourceForge and the bounty has been won by three teams, two from India and one from New York. More details and links to the projects on the CA news page. This is one of the greatest bounties for open source software and will hopefully serve as a model for other companies taking this path of cheaper development and better code."

Rollie Hawk writes "Open Source Initiative (OSI) and Computer Associates (CA) may agree that some housework is needed with open source licensing, but they may not be able to reconcile their views on the best solution. CA has a couple of possible solutions in mind for its proposed Template License. This license will likely be based on either Sun's Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) its own Trusted Open Source License. OSI, which does not favor corporate-centered licensing, opposes such moves on a number of grounds. Specifically, they point out that CDDL is not GPL-compatible. While acknowledging the problems with license proliferation, OSI prefers a solution involving stricter criteria (including that approved licenses must me non-duplicative, clear and understandable, and reusable) and is proposing a "three-tier system in which licenses are classified as preferred, approved or deprecated." While there is no legal requirement for any open-source license to be approved by OSI, it is currently common practice for developers to get their license blessing from it."

Rollie Hawk writes "Open Source Initiative (OSI) and Computer Associates (CA) may agree that some housework is needed with open source licensing, but they may not be able to reconcile their views on the best solution. CA has a couple of possible solutions in mind for its proposed Template License. This license will likely be based on either Sun's Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) its own Trusted Open Source License. OSI, which does not favor corporate-centered licensing, opposes such moves on a number of grounds. Specifically, they point out that CDDL is not GPL-compatible. While acknowledging the problems with license proliferation, OSI prefers a solution involving stricter criteria (including that approved licenses must me non-duplicative, clear and understandable, and reusable) and is proposing a "three-tier system in which licenses are classified as preferred, approved or deprecated." While there is no legal requirement for any open-source license to be approved by OSI, it is currently common practice for developers to get their license blessing from it."

An anonymous reader writes "CNN is carrying a story about how Sanjay Kumar, ex-CEO of Computer Associates, was indicted on fraud charges. Prosecutors said the long-running accounting fraud scheme featured what came to be known by Computer Associates employees as a "35-day month" because company books were routinely kept open until revenues exceeded projected goals. "The defendants cooked the books by simply keeping them open beyond the end of a fiscal quarter for however long it took to meet the analysts earning estimates," said Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Comey said by the time the "house of cards" collapsed, about $2.2 Billion in revenue was booked prematurely. Good thing CA settled it's case with the DOJ."

The idea of a Slashdot interview with Sam Greenblatt, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of CA's Linux Technology Group, grew out of the company's decision not only to release its Ingres r3 database under an open source license but also their offer of up to $1 million to developers who write migration tools for it. Today we present Greenblatt's answers. 1) CA's history -- by nightsweat
CA has historically been a place where good products go to die after the original company that put the successful software out is purchased by CA.

Is the Open Source Initiative seen internally as a way to address the problem that killed (or maimed) top programs like Quattro Pro, AccPac, and ArcServe?

Greenblatt:
Computer Associates has always built products and used acquisitions to fill out the portfolio of solutions we bring to market. Open source should never be viewed as a mechanism to jettison products. We at Computer Associates believe that open sourcing a project is a way of making a product more available to more developers, and to make it more successful in the marketplace.

Regarding the products that you mentioned -
*CA never purchased Quattro Pro
*CA sold the subsidiary ACCPAC International to The Sage Group
in December 2003. The sale of ACCPAC culminated CA's multi-year effort to exit the business applications market and focus the company's strategy on management software.
*BrightStor ARCserve Backup is a strategic product in CA's BrightStor storage management solution portfolio and continues to be a strong revenue producer for CA.

2) Moving from closed to open source -- by Theatetus
Most big open-source projects (apache, linux, etc.) started out as open-source and have had a million eyes on them from the beginning. Ingres, on the other hand, is just getting all those eyeballs now after it is already a very mature product.

Have there been any difficulties relating to moving a mature closed-source project to an open-source model? Any caveats or lessons learned for others who want to make a similar migration?

Greenblatt:
Ingres started out as an open source project with a BSD license and moved to commercial software when Michael Stonebraker formed Ingres Corp.. Over the last 25 years, Ingres has grown in functionality and is now returning to its roots in the open source community. There is no question that Ingres is the most functional and best database in the open source market today - it will ultimately attract a multitude of contributors to the project. It is important that others looking to make a similar migration, build a community around the product before releasing it, similar to what CA has done with our work with the JBoss, Zope and the Plone Foundation.

3) Fair Compensation -- by Lord_Dweomer
Do you feel that $1 million dollars is fair compensation for the developer when if you were to hire and develop "normally" it would cost many times that?

Greenblatt:
The challenge is not intended to compensate for development efforts but to rather to seed the community with funds to enable members to work on the project without the constraints of financial hardship. There is no question that CA could have and would have built these tools but we decided to challenge the community to build these tools and to begin working with CA on open source projects around Ingres.

4) Burned bridge repair? -- by macemoneta
CA has burned a lot of bridges in the past with customers. Is this an attempt to change CA's image, and/or repair some of that historical damage?

Greenblatt:
CA has been systematically working to improve its relationships with customers. We have more than 600 non-commissioned sales people whose job it is to make sure that customers are satisfied We launched FlexSelect licensing to offer customers a better way to buy the software they need from us on their terms. These efforts are paying off - our customer satisfaction surveys continue to improve every year, and show dramatic increases over the past three or four years.

5) Unique Selling Points -- by thisfred
What, would you say, sets Ingres apart from existing (more or less) Open Source Database products like PostgreSQL and MySQL?

In other words, why should I as an open source developer be interested in Ingres?

Greenblatt:
This question is like comparing the three divergent products in asking which one should one use. We understand that there are different reasons for selecting each product. It is incumbent upon you the end user or developer to look for the one that best meets the needs of their application. There is no question that when this is done there will be no doubt in the users' mind that they need the most functional and robust database in the marketplace thus making Ingres the best choice.

6) Cosmo? -- by drfrog
Waaay back when there was this company called SGI, and they had this web based 3d plugin called cosmoplayer, later on cosmo became a whole division at SGI. Sporting amazing editors for developing 3d on the web as well as the plugin for displaying.

You may remember the '2nd web' campaign they had

ANYWAYS

Amidst the dot com bubble they decided to sell off this venture. CA bought it, amidst promises & rumours of releasing this software open source. Alas nothing ever came to pass and that left more than a few embittered web3D developers.

So i ask....{in two parts}
What has ever become of this aquisition and what, if anything, will ever happen with cosmo?

Greenblatt:
Actually, Cosmo was purchased from SGI by Platinum Technology in 1998. To the best of my knowledge, Platinum laid off most employees associated with Cosmo and talked about submitting Cosmo to open source. CA acquired Cosmo with the acquisition of Platinum in May 1999. Soon after the acquisition, CA made Cosmo available on the web for free distribution, but never announced any plans for releasing the product into open source. Additional information on Cosmo can be found at http://www.ca.com/cosmo/.

7) Other open products -- by opqdonut
Are you planning to release other software under the GPL or some other open license?

Greenblatt:
We will look to release other products into open source under the CA Trusted Open Source License where it makes sense.

8) Wither Ingres? -- by Herbmaster
I'm wondering, what does CA expect customers will get out of the open-source Ingres strategy? It seems you can already do better than Ingres for free, and with more favorable licensing terms (either BSD or GNU), even if you're looking for faster, more reliable, or a more robust database. Sure, third party developers could address Ingres's shortcomings now that it's open source, but why would they bother? (I'm mostly speaking about PostgreSQL, but even MySQL can be better capable than Ingres in some applications).

What I wonder even more, though, is what CA gets out of it. If CA is ready and willing to embrace open source software, why not drop Ingres from CA products that embed databases, and switch to PostgreSQL, shifting the Ingres developers to work on contributing to postgres's code? I'm thinking something more akin to Apple's open-source relationship with MacOS X, consider not only Darwin, but also GCC. I think it's proven to be an effective and beneficial relationship.

Greenblatt:
Ingres is a fantastic technology. Open innovation has been blocked above the operating system. By open sourcing Ingres, we will create the next generation of database and application innovation. CA will embed a management database based on Ingres into several core technologies.

9) Impact on revenue -- by pen
How are you expecting this decision to impact your revenue? Are you hoping for more support revenue to make up for licensing revenue?

How would you respond to someone repackaging the software?

Greenblatt:
CA will provide support for Ingres r3, including indemnification, as an added cost option. Software developers can incorporate Ingres into their own solutions as long as the Ingres source code is made available in accordance with the CA Trusted Open Source License (CATOSL).

10) Can you just give me the money? -- by anti-NAT
I'm a really nice person, and therefore I deserve it :-) .

Greenblatt:
Is that my daughter??????

#####

The idea of a Slashdot interview with Sam Greenblatt, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of CA's Linux Technology Group, grew out of the company's decision not only to release its Ingres r3 database under an open source license but also their offer of up to $1 million to developers who write migration tools for it. Today we present Greenblatt's answers. 1) CA's history -- by nightsweat
CA has historically been a place where good products go to die after the original company that put the successful software out is purchased by CA.

Is the Open Source Initiative seen internally as a way to address the problem that killed (or maimed) top programs like Quattro Pro, AccPac, and ArcServe?

Greenblatt:
Computer Associates has always built products and used acquisitions to fill out the portfolio of solutions we bring to market. Open source should never be viewed as a mechanism to jettison products. We at Computer Associates believe that open sourcing a project is a way of making a product more available to more developers, and to make it more successful in the marketplace.

Regarding the products that you mentioned -
*CA never purchased Quattro Pro
*CA sold the subsidiary ACCPAC International to The Sage Group
in December 2003. The sale of ACCPAC culminated CA's multi-year effort to exit the business applications market and focus the company's strategy on management software.
*BrightStor ARCserve Backup is a strategic product in CA's BrightStor storage management solution portfolio and continues to be a strong revenue producer for CA.

2) Moving from closed to open source -- by Theatetus
Most big open-source projects (apache, linux, etc.) started out as open-source and have had a million eyes on them from the beginning. Ingres, on the other hand, is just getting all those eyeballs now after it is already a very mature product.

Have there been any difficulties relating to moving a mature closed-source project to an open-source model? Any caveats or lessons learned for others who want to make a similar migration?

Greenblatt:
Ingres started out as an open source project with a BSD license and moved to commercial software when Michael Stonebraker formed Ingres Corp.. Over the last 25 years, Ingres has grown in functionality and is now returning to its roots in the open source community. There is no question that Ingres is the most functional and best database in the open source market today - it will ultimately attract a multitude of contributors to the project. It is important that others looking to make a similar migration, build a community around the product before releasing it, similar to what CA has done with our work with the JBoss, Zope and the Plone Foundation.

3) Fair Compensation -- by Lord_Dweomer
Do you feel that $1 million dollars is fair compensation for the developer when if you were to hire and develop "normally" it would cost many times that?

Greenblatt:
The challenge is not intended to compensate for development efforts but to rather to seed the community with funds to enable members to work on the project without the constraints of financial hardship. There is no question that CA could have and would have built these tools but we decided to challenge the community to build these tools and to begin working with CA on open source projects around Ingres.

4) Burned bridge repair? -- by macemoneta
CA has burned a lot of bridges in the past with customers. Is this an attempt to change CA's image, and/or repair some of that historical damage?

Greenblatt:
CA has been systematically working to improve its relationships with customers. We have more than 600 non-commissioned sales people whose job it is to make sure that customers are satisfied We launched FlexSelect licensing to offer customers a better way to buy the software they need from us on their terms. These efforts are paying off - our customer satisfaction surveys continue to improve every year, and show dramatic increases over the past three or four years.

5) Unique Selling Points -- by thisfred
What, would you say, sets Ingres apart from existing (more or less) Open Source Database products like PostgreSQL and MySQL?

In other words, why should I as an open source developer be interested in Ingres?

Greenblatt:
This question is like comparing the three divergent products in asking which one should one use. We understand that there are different reasons for selecting each product. It is incumbent upon you the end user or developer to look for the one that best meets the needs of their application. There is no question that when this is done there will be no doubt in the users' mind that they need the most functional and robust database in the marketplace thus making Ingres the best choice.

6) Cosmo? -- by drfrog
Waaay back when there was this company called SGI, and they had this web based 3d plugin called cosmoplayer, later on cosmo became a whole division at SGI. Sporting amazing editors for developing 3d on the web as well as the plugin for displaying.

You may remember the '2nd web' campaign they had

ANYWAYS

Amidst the dot com bubble they decided to sell off this venture. CA bought it, amidst promises & rumours of releasing this software open source. Alas nothing ever came to pass and that left more than a few embittered web3D developers.

So i ask....{in two parts}
What has ever become of this aquisition and what, if anything, will ever happen with cosmo?

Greenblatt:
Actually, Cosmo was purchased from SGI by Platinum Technology in 1998. To the best of my knowledge, Platinum laid off most employees associated with Cosmo and talked about submitting Cosmo to open source. CA acquired Cosmo with the acquisition of Platinum in May 1999. Soon after the acquisition, CA made Cosmo available on the web for free distribution, but never announced any plans for releasing the product into open source. Additional information on Cosmo can be found at http://www.ca.com/cosmo/.

7) Other open products -- by opqdonut
Are you planning to release other software under the GPL or some other open license?

Greenblatt:
We will look to release other products into open source under the CA Trusted Open Source License where it makes sense.

8) Wither Ingres? -- by Herbmaster
I'm wondering, what does CA expect customers will get out of the open-source Ingres strategy? It seems you can already do better than Ingres for free, and with more favorable licensing terms (either BSD or GNU), even if you're looking for faster, more reliable, or a more robust database. Sure, third party developers could address Ingres's shortcomings now that it's open source, but why would they bother? (I'm mostly speaking about PostgreSQL, but even MySQL can be better capable than Ingres in some applications).

What I wonder even more, though, is what CA gets out of it. If CA is ready and willing to embrace open source software, why not drop Ingres from CA products that embed databases, and switch to PostgreSQL, shifting the Ingres developers to work on contributing to postgres's code? I'm thinking something more akin to Apple's open-source relationship with MacOS X, consider not only Darwin, but also GCC. I think it's proven to be an effective and beneficial relationship.

Greenblatt:
Ingres is a fantastic technology. Open innovation has been blocked above the operating system. By open sourcing Ingres, we will create the next generation of database and application innovation. CA will embed a management database based on Ingres into several core technologies.

9) Impact on revenue -- by pen
How are you expecting this decision to impact your revenue? Are you hoping for more support revenue to make up for licensing revenue?

How would you respond to someone repackaging the software?

Greenblatt:
CA will provide support for Ingres r3, including indemnification, as an added cost option. Software developers can incorporate Ingres into their own solutions as long as the Ingres source code is made available in accordance with the CA Trusted Open Source License (CATOSL).

10) Can you just give me the money? -- by anti-NAT
I'm a really nice person, and therefore I deserve it :-) .

Greenblatt:
Is that my daughter??????

#####

The idea of a Slashdot interview with Sam Greenblatt, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of CA's Linux Technology Group, grew out of the company's decision not only to release its Ingres r3 database under an open source license but also their offer of up to $1 million to developers who write migration tools for it. Today we present Greenblatt's answers. 1) CA's history -- by nightsweat
CA has historically been a place where good products go to die after the original company that put the successful software out is purchased by CA.

Is the Open Source Initiative seen internally as a way to address the problem that killed (or maimed) top programs like Quattro Pro, AccPac, and ArcServe?

Greenblatt:
Computer Associates has always built products and used acquisitions to fill out the portfolio of solutions we bring to market. Open source should never be viewed as a mechanism to jettison products. We at Computer Associates believe that open sourcing a project is a way of making a product more available to more developers, and to make it more successful in the marketplace.

Regarding the products that you mentioned -
*CA never purchased Quattro Pro
*CA sold the subsidiary ACCPAC International to The Sage Group
in December 2003. The sale of ACCPAC culminated CA's multi-year effort to exit the business applications market and focus the company's strategy on management software.
*BrightStor ARCserve Backup is a strategic product in CA's BrightStor storage management solution portfolio and continues to be a strong revenue producer for CA.

2) Moving from closed to open source -- by Theatetus
Most big open-source projects (apache, linux, etc.) started out as open-source and have had a million eyes on them from the beginning. Ingres, on the other hand, is just getting all those eyeballs now after it is already a very mature product.

Have there been any difficulties relating to moving a mature closed-source project to an open-source model? Any caveats or lessons learned for others who want to make a similar migration?

Greenblatt:
Ingres started out as an open source project with a BSD license and moved to commercial software when Michael Stonebraker formed Ingres Corp.. Over the last 25 years, Ingres has grown in functionality and is now returning to its roots in the open source community. There is no question that Ingres is the most functional and best database in the open source market today - it will ultimately attract a multitude of contributors to the project. It is important that others looking to make a similar migration, build a community around the product before releasing it, similar to what CA has done with our work with the JBoss, Zope and the Plone Foundation.

3) Fair Compensation -- by Lord_Dweomer
Do you feel that $1 million dollars is fair compensation for the developer when if you were to hire and develop "normally" it would cost many times that?

Greenblatt:
The challenge is not intended to compensate for development efforts but to rather to seed the community with funds to enable members to work on the project without the constraints of financial hardship. There is no question that CA could have and would have built these tools but we decided to challenge the community to build these tools and to begin working with CA on open source projects around Ingres.

4) Burned bridge repair? -- by macemoneta
CA has burned a lot of bridges in the past with customers. Is this an attempt to change CA's image, and/or repair some of that historical damage?

Greenblatt:
CA has been systematically working to improve its relationships with customers. We have more than 600 non-commissioned sales people whose job it is to make sure that customers are satisfied We launched FlexSelect licensing to offer customers a better way to buy the software they need from us on their terms. These efforts are paying off - our customer satisfaction surveys continue to improve every year, and show dramatic increases over the past three or four years.

5) Unique Selling Points -- by thisfred
What, would you say, sets Ingres apart from existing (more or less) Open Source Database products like PostgreSQL and MySQL?

In other words, why should I as an open source developer be interested in Ingres?

Greenblatt:
This question is like comparing the three divergent products in asking which one should one use. We understand that there are different reasons for selecting each product. It is incumbent upon you the end user or developer to look for the one that best meets the needs of their application. There is no question that when this is done there will be no doubt in the users' mind that they need the most functional and robust database in the marketplace thus making Ingres the best choice.

6) Cosmo? -- by drfrog
Waaay back when there was this company called SGI, and they had this web based 3d plugin called cosmoplayer, later on cosmo became a whole division at SGI. Sporting amazing editors for developing 3d on the web as well as the plugin for displaying.

You may remember the '2nd web' campaign they had

ANYWAYS

Amidst the dot com bubble they decided to sell off this venture. CA bought it, amidst promises & rumours of releasing this software open source. Alas nothing ever came to pass and that left more than a few embittered web3D developers.

So i ask....{in two parts}
What has ever become of this aquisition and what, if anything, will ever happen with cosmo?

Greenblatt:
Actually, Cosmo was purchased from SGI by Platinum Technology in 1998. To the best of my knowledge, Platinum laid off most employees associated with Cosmo and talked about submitting Cosmo to open source. CA acquired Cosmo with the acquisition of Platinum in May 1999. Soon after the acquisition, CA made Cosmo available on the web for free distribution, but never announced any plans for releasing the product into open source. Additional information on Cosmo can be found at http://www.ca.com/cosmo/.

7) Other open products -- by opqdonut
Are you planning to release other software under the GPL or some other open license?

Greenblatt:
We will look to release other products into open source under the CA Trusted Open Source License where it makes sense.

8) Wither Ingres? -- by Herbmaster
I'm wondering, what does CA expect customers will get out of the open-source Ingres strategy? It seems you can already do better than Ingres for free, and with more favorable licensing terms (either BSD or GNU), even if you're looking for faster, more reliable, or a more robust database. Sure, third party developers could address Ingres's shortcomings now that it's open source, but why would they bother? (I'm mostly speaking about PostgreSQL, but even MySQL can be better capable than Ingres in some applications).

What I wonder even more, though, is what CA gets out of it. If CA is ready and willing to embrace open source software, why not drop Ingres from CA products that embed databases, and switch to PostgreSQL, shifting the Ingres developers to work on contributing to postgres's code? I'm thinking something more akin to Apple's open-source relationship with MacOS X, consider not only Darwin, but also GCC. I think it's proven to be an effective and beneficial relationship.

Greenblatt:
Ingres is a fantastic technology. Open innovation has been blocked above the operating system. By open sourcing Ingres, we will create the next generation of database and application innovation. CA will embed a management database based on Ingres into several core technologies.

9) Impact on revenue -- by pen
How are you expecting this decision to impact your revenue? Are you hoping for more support revenue to make up for licensing revenue?

How would you respond to someone repackaging the software?

Greenblatt:
CA will provide support for Ingres r3, including indemnification, as an added cost option. Software developers can incorporate Ingres into their own solutions as long as the Ingres source code is made available in accordance with the CA Trusted Open Source License (CATOSL).

10) Can you just give me the money? -- by anti-NAT
I'm a really nice person, and therefore I deserve it :-) .

Greenblatt:
Is that my daughter??????

#####

Several large companies have recently released previously proprietary software into the open source wilds. The splashiest announcement along these lines was from CA, who opened their Ingres r3database -- and offered up to $1 million in incentives for development of Ingres migration tools. For those of you who want to earn a piece of that money, and for all of us who have questions about how and why CA is cozying up to open source developers, the person with the answers is Sam Greenblatt, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of CA's Linux Technology Group. So ask, already. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Sam by email, and post his answers as soon as we get them back.

Several large companies have recently released previously proprietary software into the open source wilds. The splashiest announcement along these lines was from CA, who opened their Ingres r3database -- and offered up to $1 million in incentives for development of Ingres migration tools. For those of you who want to earn a piece of that money, and for all of us who have questions about how and why CA is cozying up to open source developers, the person with the answers is Sam Greenblatt, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of CA's Linux Technology Group. So ask, already. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Sam by email, and post his answers as soon as we get them back.

Several large companies have recently released previously proprietary software into the open source wilds. The splashiest announcement along these lines was from CA, who opened their Ingres r3database -- and offered up to $1 million in incentives for development of Ingres migration tools. For those of you who want to earn a piece of that money, and for all of us who have questions about how and why CA is cozying up to open source developers, the person with the answers is Sam Greenblatt, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of CA's Linux Technology Group. So ask, already. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Sam by email, and post his answers as soon as we get them back.

An anonymous reader writes "Computer Associates, on the heels of their announcement that they were moving to the service and support model, hence open sourcing Ingres, is set to announce a $1 million bounty for Ingres conversion tools [the idea being, obviously, to convert to Ingres, rather than away from it]. The bounty announcement coincides with the official announcement of the downloadability of the new, open-source Ingres. An earlier Information Week article rues the passing of Jasmine, which was a great idea, and, although perhaps a few years [maybe a decade?] ahead of its time, still the sort of thing that people like me could sure benefit from. Hint, hint..."

trifakir asks: "We are running some quite expensive SunFire servers with Solaris 8. In the 'crontabs' of these hosts we have scheduled maybe some hundred odd jobs, which are constrained by multiple factors: dependencies on other jobs, time constrains, CPU and memory usage, network bandwidth, and so on. Obviously this imposes a CSP. On the other hand the number of these jobs, each one of them can take from minutes to hours is growing and we are now experiencing performance problems given the limited resources we have. Of course we have opened the bag-of-tricks with our best *ad-hoc* solutions, using mostly Open Source software, to turn our system into an event-based and less dependent on the scheduling expertise of the admins. At certain point we were considering using AutoSys and I was looking for a grid-like scheduler like OpenPBS, both of which were discarded for various reasons. I am curious, how you guys, would solve this problem, which seems very trivial for many environments. Both advice about theory (scheduling) and practice will help us and any other readers who may be tackling this difficult problem."

Dynamoo writes "The Internet Storm Center has issued a Yellow Alert due to the spread of the Sasser worm exploiting Windows 2000 and XP machines through a documented flaw in the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) as described in Microsoft Bulletin MS04-011. Initial analysis seems to indicate classic Blaster-style worm behaviour. Right now I'm just getting a probe every 10 minutes or so on my firewall, but this is bound to escalate sharply as the pool of infected machines grows. Of course all good Windows-using Slashdotters visit Windows Update regularly and have a firewall, don't you? More information at Computer Associates, F-Secure, Symantec and McAfee."

dnxthx asks: "After performing a fairly comprehensive web search (including Slashdot) I came to the (possibly incorrect) conclusion that there were no high-visibility sites that comprehensively reviewed and compared data modeling tools such as ER/Studio, ERWin, DeZign for Databases, System Architect, or Visio for Enterprise Architects. Since some of these tools can be quite expensive (ERWin is about $4K US it seems), I was wondering what the Slashdot community's experiences were with data modeling tools such as these, or some that our group has overlooked."

geoff313 writes " For all of you who might be worried about what financial consequences Linus Torvalds might have to endure as a result of being subpoenaed by SCO, fear not: the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) will pay for its law firm to represent him. the OSDL, who are Torvalds' employer, will announce on Friday that the "OSDL has agreed to fund legal representation for Torvalds and any other employees of the lab who may become involved in the litigation." Just in case you didn't you didn't know, the OSDL is funded by a variety of corporations including (but not limitied to) IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Cisco, Computer Associates, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Nokia. "

theodp writes "After exchanging e-mail with mainframe software pioneer Mario Morino, Tim O'Reilly writes 'It's important for the open source community to look more at the software heritage of the mainframe era.' O'Reilly might want to take a look at how Marino's own MICS software has been used since the 80's to automatically charge IBM mainframe users for printed material that could be ordered from PC clients with a single action by using billing and shipping information that was previously stored on a Mainframe server. The whole process might seem oddly familiar."

watzinaneihm writes "Eweek has an Article about how Linux is getting accepted in Enterprises.IBM is releasing Tivoli for Linux. CA released Unicenter for Linux a few months ago.I got rumours about rumours that HP might do something similar with Openview. " One for those of you who dress nicer than me.

nakhla writes "MSNBC.com is running a story on how an Italian soccer team is using artificial intelligence to predict sports injuries. The team is working with Computer Associates to develop neural network technology that can be combined with daily tests of the athletes to determine patterns which occur right before a player gets injured. Of course, one has to assume that it wouldn't be able to predict a player getting kicked in the head in the middle of the game, resulting in a concussion." I was wondering how to tie a World Cup story into Slashdot. Congratulations to Senegal.