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CA Advantage Ingres To Be Released As Open Source
Bruce Perens writes "Computer Associates is releasing CA Advantage Ingres as Open Source under a variant of the Common Public License. The press release is here. This is a commercial fork of the public-domain University Ingres of the '80's, probably the first real relational database. CA's product added SQL and in general brought the program up to enterprise quality. So has the PostgreSQL project. It will be interesting to see if there can be any synergies between the two products. The BSD licensing on PostgreSQL would allow it."
Here's an article at CRN on this and a few other open source moves announced today by CA; can anyone find a link to the text of CA's "Trusted Open Source License"? Related news, contributed by an semi-anonymous reader, is that CA has established "a new open-source foundation that will support Plone, the content management system built on the free Zope Application server," and that Plone's license will change as a result.
Because this is Slashdot, where aging hippies get their kicks from aging software.
It doesn't matter that Postgres does ACID-compliant transactions and is much faster and more scalable than Ingres, and actually supports SQL-92, and triggers, and stored procs, and many many other modern features.
What *does* matter is that ooooooh, shiny, I can run this on that old VAX I have sitting in my garage! The nostalgia will help me mentally escape from the fact that I'm developing severe heart disease and my rapidly deteriorating neurons are no longer wanted in the tech industry at the ridiculously high salary I demand!
Lifecycle of open source software:
1: Don't design software.
2: Code it poorly
3: Release it under the GPL
4: Get a zillion downloads.
5: No profit!!
Example: Linux.