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CA Dangles $1M Bounty for Ingres Conversion Tools
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..."
I suppose some time ago it would have been ironic that corporations are pushing their products into open source, rather than fighting it... however, now with open source software (and the movement) reaching the critical mass, they can no longer fight the tide, and have decided to ride with it.
This still made me smile though:
"Linux has proved you can have a successful commercial business around open source," Barrenechea says. "The innovation model in high tech is no longer constrained to corporations, no longer constrained to universities, no longer constrained to venture capitalists, but now is open to a million developers strong who want to contribute."
(quote of Mark Barrenechea, senior VP of product development for CA. )
http://efil.blogspot.com/
CUBIC*CUBE
I think that square is top of cool shape in the world.
Wait...the article isn't about Engrish? It's what? Ingres?! D'oh!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
if I write some Ingres-deletion tools?
Sig. No Sig.
First it was the big Linux guys -- Red Hat, Mandrake, etc. They GAVE AWAY their best products for FREE.
Then Big Blue, good ol' IBM, does the unthinkable and embraces free software as well.
Then we had Sun Microsystems consider doing the same with their Solaris beast and their Java libraries.
Now even old-timers like Computer Associates are trying to get in on this model. Is this THE NEW WAVE OF THE FUTURE?
Do we just GIVE AWAY SOFTWARE like it's nothing and then talk up our support staff and technical documentation?
We LOVE CODING too much to do that, so personally we're gonna keep doin what we love and selling it. Helping people with our products has never been fun anyway!
If you liked my post,
[the idea being, obviously, to convert to Ingres, rather than away from it]
Otherwise, they'd call it Egress...
Ok, so I think we now have to be well organised so two people aren't working on the same thing. So I let the world know I work on the Conversion Tool, so no need to waste your time, proceed to the next Slashdot story ;-)
No relation to Ingsoc? ;)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
To me, the most amazing thing about this story is that it's not really that big a deal. Sure, it merits the ./ front page, but it really isn't that earth shattering.
Five years ago, it would have been positively mind blowing! This just shows how far open source has come. And for those of us who have been hawking open source since the 90's, it's truly gratifying to read a story like this, say "Cool, another little win," and move on.
Follow the adventures of the new wandering jews
If the current corporate adoption of OSS is what constitutes critical mass (ie a few marginal projects here and there), then continue to welcome our current microsoft overlords.
Critical mass and market share are two entirely different things. The fact that open source has only a small marketshare, as measured by the number of commercial applications, does not invalidate the idea that open source has "gone critical", ie. that its mindshare is now so big that it is "exploding" on the software scene.
The metaphor from atomics isn't all that bad. Free and open source software (minus the labels) have now been around for decades, yet it is only in the last several years that they have appeared on the commercial radar, first as inconsequential, and now as a dire threat. In the world inhabited by Microsoft and friends, this is a real explosion in the software world.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
if they'll go ahead and pony up the money to Informatica or some other ETL vendor who already does this? Informatica only needs an odbc driver. Of course you'll still need to do the mappings and create the workflows yourself.
;)
Then again Informatica has caused us no end of grief so maybe they'll pay the money to them to stop doing business
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Is the common public license compatible with the GPL and vice versa? What makes them different?
;o.
I wish they would just stick with GPL, its confusing enough as it is without adding more unless these other licenses actually do something better then the GPL
how Ingres compares to MySQL, Posgresql, Oracle?
I used to work with a guy who knew ingres; MIT's technology licensing office used it, and it ran on a dec alphaserver running..openVMS. He had guaranteed job security, pretty much.
Too bad the head of the TLO office was a real bitch, but at least never around- she was also some bigwig at a bio research "organization" (read, somebody's tax shelter).
Some fun stuff used to happen though- I sat next to the woman who handled royalty checks to the professors and stuff. One professor "lost" a +$100,000 check. After harassing the crap out of her(screaming, threats of legal action because she couldn't get a new check to him IMMEDIATELY) over the phone, he called back with his tail between his legs- the new tenant at his OLD APARTMENT found it tucked into a MAGAZINE on his coffee table.
She turned to me and said "if you had just gotten a check worth over $100,000, what would you do with it?" "Run my ass right down to the bank as fast as I could and cash it." "Exactly! Not, say, 'tuck into magazine and leave magazine on my coffee table and then forget about it and move apartments'". She then made a disparaging but very amusing comment about "rocket scientists"...
Please help metamoderate.
I was very exited about this as I have extensive SQL Server knowledge as well as some Ingres experience. As it turns out however, I can't enter. The PDF with the terms and conditions contains this paragraph:
The contest is intended for presentation in the United States, Canada
(except Quebec Province), Mexico, India, China, United Kingdom,
Australia, and New Zealand. Do not proceed in this site if you are not a
resident of one of those countries.
(In the actual document, it's in all CAPS, but the lameness filter prevents me from posting it that way)
I live in South Africa. Oh well...
siener's youtube channel
Apache's 67.7% marketshare is marginal?
No but it's irrelevant. A couple of years ago when I was doing the web startup thing numbers like the one above were tracked very religiously. HOWEVER, like the saying goes, "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics". One of the decisions that our incredibly insightful mgmt made was to not support Netscape as a web server, citing the Netcraft #'s that showed it had a very small percentage of the market, esp compared to Apache. Well guess what, what they didn't take into account was that when you're trying to sell enterprise products, it's quality, not quanity that counts. All those websites running Apache were for the most part ma and pa/joe nerd websites. Pretty much everyone running Netscape was a Fortune 500 company. Gee, guess who's gonna spend >$10K for an enterprise web solution, the 1000 guys who downloaded Apache to run their blogs and Natalie Portman tribute sites, or Bank of America?
What can Ingres do for me that Postgres cannot?
I ask this question hoping an Ingres fan was waiting for this opportunity.
Bet you can't wait for Bill to stick his Longhorn up your ass either.
netsol's registry is ingres
[This sig left intentionally blank.]
Quoth the ever-helpful Wikipedia:
So Ingres is more than just backdoors running on 1524/tcp.Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.
-- null
Here's a full article at daemonnews about the history of postgresql.
It would be interesting if someone would benchmark these, noting the similarities and differences between the two now that ingres is open source. Also, maybe the pgsql development team could learn a thing or two by studying what CA did with ingres over the years. Maybe there is still some common code and design paradigms left between the two.
Computer Associates will buy your company, chew on it until its got all the flavor, then spit you out. My company started a data warehouse with Platinum software (great a metadata and data movement), then Platinum was bought by these guys, and CA halted development. We had to sue them to get our project money back.
CA has been buying companies for years, and not necessarily in a good way for consumers.
"At No. 4, we have Computer Associates. The current federal investigation into accounting irregularities notwithstanding, the company's longtime practice of acquiring aging technologies, slashing new development, and attempting to milk the installed base for service and support is a bigger issue. Users are trapped, CA knows it, and it does its best to take advantage of the situation."
I benchmarked Ingres in the late 1980s. It was half the speed of Oracle then. And 1/50 of the speed of a dedicated Network (Codasyl) model for the same data.
The benchmarks were all done on the same machine, using the same data, and as close to the same data model as could be had vs the various DBMSes involved.
Needless to say, we didn't use it for anything after that.
You can do what you want, and write what you want, but you're not eligible for one of the prizes unless you're from one of the listed countries.
ca always has and always will be the absolute worst software company on the planet. they blow chunks, spewing worthless products all over our computers for years and years.
I'm still bitter.
corrupt my database beyond repair. I don't know about you guys, but my experience with Ingres on Linux has not been fun. Ingres is packaged with Arcserve for all database needs. It unfortunately has an uncanny knack for dying repeatedly regardless of regular pruning of old entries and applying extensions (recommended by CA). It seems that extending the database only prolongs the inevitable. Is this only a Linux thing? Does the problem exist on other platforms? CA could only recommend workarounds.
You would be wiser to consider some of those 'hairy zealots' as sage advisors than worrying nutcases.
Why does TFA never mention Postgres. Anyone have any insight into why CA thinks playing catch-up with Ingres would be better than scrapping it in favor of Postgres?
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
one could argue working a fixed salary is much better than wasting your time chasing a bounty. If they have 1 million dollars to spend why don't they just hire some developers to make this thing and open sources it?
did you forget to take your meds?
Why would anybody want to migrate towards a new Open Source database server when there are already two, one of which is its own bastard cousin? See, if the fact of your DB server being Open Source is that vitally important -- say, a "no source, no sale" procurement policy -- then you will already have chosen one of the Big Two:
PostgreSQL is an indirect descendant of an earlier version of Ingres; and, having been Open Source all along, ought to have improved slightly faster than the original Ingres project. It has a reputation for slowness; but, then again, so does Ingres.
MySQL is undisputedly fast; but when you actually look at what it had to jettison in order to get that speeds boost, you might think twice about deploying it. Think of it more as a sort of scripting language extension for handling a special kind of array, than a "proper" relational database server. {But, said the amateur tech pundit, watch out; because someday soon, Lua is going to find its way into MySQL, giving it those fancy "staw'd pro-cee-joor" deeleys.}
If it is not important that you are using an Open Source solution, and you aren't using one of the Big Two anyway, why are you going to suddenly want to switch to Open Source? And if you were already thinking of switching to Open Source, chances are you've already chosen Postgres or My.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
However, I think in the future, it is fair that OS developers get paid a large amount of money even if its not near what the company would have to pay. Its a lot for an individual, and its basically freelance work for a LOT of money. I don't really see a problem with this pricing, except with the fact that they get to keep all entries and there is no guarantee of the money.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
ceren is a hot, hot, hot vixen.
Here is a company that is offering FREE MONEY for you to do something you ALREADY DO...develop stuff. If you don't like it, can I assume that you'll all not waste CA's time by submitting an entry? What do you want from them anyway? This is the kind of crap that gives this community such a pathetic reputation. Some company tries to change the method they have done business under for a long time, and offer you a chunk of money for it, and you complain and call them names.
Frankly, I'm going to give it a shot. What do I have to loose...not much. What do I have to gain...about $400,000.00. Grow up people and start being part of the solution, not part of the problem.
They had a pretty cool 4GL linked with it. Wonder what happened with it. It was well ahead of it's time, VB .nut has just finally over taken it in.
Jasmine is not to be missed. It was yet another of those aberrations, an OORDBMS - or in other words, a contradiction in terms.
While current Ingres also violates the relational model by grafting SQL misfeatures even to its QUEL flavour, it perhaps could be made sane.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I heard (read on the web but can't find it on google now) that back in the early 80s the Justice Department did a study that found that a lot of rural DA's offices suffered from lack of coordination of cases, particularly when they were prosecuting the same guy for different crimes and maybe also calling him as a witness against other parties. The Justice Department gave a small Northern Virginia company a grant to write some database software to address this, which would take advantage of the new personal computers that were then appearing.
The grant specified that the software would be given away free. This was an early version of Ingres. I don't know if it was the first verion of Ingres, it may have had academic roots. Many DA offices used it, and it also became popular among businesses. It was shipped configured to allow you to specify persons, lists of your people who had various relationships with them, and cases, which could be related to persons both in your organization and at large.
At some point in time the CIA found out that the KGB used this software to keep track of their officers and contacts, in particular to be able to figure out who a particular person could identify should they be turned by the other side.
The CIA went the Ingres guys, or maybe it was already CA by then, and paid them to develope a second updated version which the CIA would insert a back door into. The back door was that if no one touched the keyboard for a certain amount of time, and the time was at night, it would attempt to dial a certain phone number and pick up from there queries to run and subsequent different numbers to dial. The story was specific in that it said it turned off the speaker on the modem.
Who knows if it was successful -- I wonder if Russian bureaucrats would have had modems -- but it all came out because CA claimed the CIA never paid them for putting in the back door and sued the CIA in Federal court.
Was this Ingres or not ? Does anyone have a link to the story ?