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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.
Why would someone want to use this instead of PostgreSQL?
dtach - A tiny program that emulates the detach feat
With all the quality open-source RDBMS's like Postgres, Firebird and now Ingres why the hell would anybody, ANYBODY want to use a hacked up beast like MYSQL for heavy database work. MYSQL was beautiful when it was used for what it was designed for. At some point, the developers gave in to user demands to start adding in RDBMS functionality, and now its a multiheaded beast. Sad.
It seems like this sort of announcement is becoming a common thing. Heck, even Microsoft did this with their WIX installer.
Step 1: Dust off the source code for something that hasn't made any money in years.
Step 2: Slap a GPL on it.
Step 3: Release it to SourceForge.
Step 3: Gain the goodwill of the open-source community.
Unknown host pong.
You use a non-toy language which abstracts out the peculiarities of those databases.
"use DBI;" and all those databases work.
Until you try an outer join or something other than trivial SELECTs. At least some of them have different syntax from others, and then there's the matter of working around MySQL's inadequacies. DBI is of very little help.
Infuriate left and right
You use a non-toy language which abstracts out the peculiarities of those databases.
What if you're creating a 'non-toy' database application. Do you really think DBI abstracts the differences in all of these databases, even when using triggers, etc, to the point where you don't have to worry about it? Uh.. No."use DBI;" and all those databases work.
What I want to know is: What do you have against toys? Scared by a clown as a child?
Even on the big, bad interweb, sometimes one doesn't feel like writing "production" "code." Sometimes one may just want to make amusing and useful applications that need to manage fair amounts of data. And then one might want to share them with others.
Sheesh. People here can get so serious about computers. Coding is such a manly art!
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
If you're prepared to accept dBase II as a relational database, then I'd submit that IBM's ISAM/VSAM files have been around a good deal longer than that and they're fairly similar in terms of capability. No transaction level support, no ACID compliance, etc.
In terms of longevity, I've heard that William the Conqueror was tracking his troops using ISAM files when he invaded England in 1066.
Is anyone else a little bit disturbed by this change in licensing? Perhaps it was the CA guy referring to the GPL as "viral" in the article, or perhaps it was that they went out of the way to reassure us that nothing "sinister" was going on. Maybe it's the fact that they are coming up with (yet another) open source license, which typically means they have some hokey rule in there that fits the OSI's definition legally, but not in spirit.
I could definitely be considered paranoid, but they could have easily dual-licensed it as GPL and something else (which they state above in the FAQ) without coming across as a little sinister, but nowhere in the article do they mention dual-licensing w/ GPL. Add that to the "viral" comment and some of the other stuff they said, and I don't think the open source license will wind up being as good as you might think. Time to fork Plone? (j/k) I hope that I'm proven to simply be a bit jumpy, and not actually right...
It's more a problem with PHP than with anything else - failure to have a unified DBMS driver as about every other scripting language does.
A LOT of companies use these tools, partly because they are simple and quick.
I've also used MS Access when it suited. For getting something implemented in a department in a very short deadline as an interim solution to something more scalable and stable.
As for the cost, well, they include it in the business plan. Except for very small companies, Oracle is considered "affordable" by the upper management.