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CA Advantage Ingres To Be Released As Open Source

Posted by timothy on from the a-place-for-your-stuff dept.

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.

9 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Why not PostgreSQL? by RuneB · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why would someone want to use this instead of PostgreSQL?

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    dtach - A tiny program that emulates the detach feat
    1. Re:Why not PostgreSQL? by molarmass192 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The only reason I can think is that Ingres was at one time one of the big 4, namely Oracle, Sybase, DB2, and Ingres. It comes from a commercial heritage, so it might be an easier sell to Joe CIO?

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      Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
    2. Re:Why not PostgreSQL? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You wouldn't. The source code is so that existing legacy customers can fix their own bugs.

  2. MYSQL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:MYSQL by hendridm · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is Slashdot, where PHP, MySQL, and Visual Basic are "toy" applications. PHP is awesome and getting better all the time. Is it the killer language that will devour all others? Hell no, but my clients don't seem to care as long as their sites are running. MySQL is the backend on them all, too. Works great for what they need. Is Visual Basic toxic waste that causes new programmers to forever learn how to code the wrong way? Yes, but it seems to do okay for RAD at my current employer. Yeah, the apps would be cool if they were in C++, but it isn't necessary for nearly all the apps the employees use.

      Use the right tool for the job! Sometimes standards are more important than cutting edge. Would I like to upgrade our web server to something less loathsome than ASP and FrontPage extensions? Hell yes! But transition takes time, especially in a zero-budget bureaucracy...

  3. Another has-been set free by k4_pacific · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    Unknown host pong.
    1. Re:Another has-been set free by Trailer+Trash · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Bring it on! Seriously, if something isn't making money for a company, what's to lose? The more source we have available, the better off the entire computing industry is...

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      Do you have ESP?
    2. Re:Another has-been set free by Linus+Sixpack · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yea but available code without a simple free license is a problem as well as a bonus.

      At least it will make patent searches easier :)

      ls

  4. Until ... by A+nonymous+Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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