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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..."

9 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. More info... by manavendra · · Score: 4, Informative
    Just to make it clear, it isn't a single "bounty" of $1 million:
    CA will award five prizes totaling $1 million at CAWorld 2005 in Orlando, Fla., to individuals developing the best converters for moving customers from Oracle, Informix, DB2, SQL server, and Sybase databases to the Ingres database. The top prize could be worth as much as $500,000.
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    http://efil.blogspot.com/
  2. Re:hmm.. by manavendra · · Score: 4, Informative
    I agree with you to a large extent, but my statement wasn't related to a one-off announcement by CA, though it certainly was a constitute.

    Here are some others:


    This is by no means a complete list. I wish I had more time for this post, but I don't think its worth the effort

    I also have no doubt whatsoever that your statement is bald zealotry
    Oh really? How is musing about the subtle change in tones of software companies towards open source a fanatical devotion to cause?

    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..
    Sure, corporate adoption isn't what we'd like it to be. But neither do we expect things to change overnight. But the very fact that rather than standing firm against it, or suing it, they have started exploring it, smacks of a change in stance and outlook towards open source software. Pretty soon they will figure out way to make money with this change of stance. Which is what the ultimate success of open source software will be - availability of a larger pool of free software, yet the people developing it being paid.
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    http://efil.blogspot.com/
  3. Re:hmm.. by value_added · · Score: 2, Informative

    Assuming you're still in the mood for "bald zealotry" ...

    Lambasting the proprietary front, Donofrio [senior vice president, technology and manufacturing, IBM] said, "The forces that cling to proprietary, closed ways of doing things are doing nothing to advance innovation. When you box people in, and create artificial barriers to solving problems, you can't expect creative, innovative solutions to spring forward."

    Re-asserting IBM's love for Open Source systems, he explained, "Over the next decade, you'll see the open movement apply itself to all industries and disciplines. That's because it is leveling the playing field. It's telling everyone 'come and contribute to the effort.' The creation - and value - of intellectual property will be dramatically transformed. And that's not a threat, but a profound opportunity for business."

    IBM Wont Use Patents Against Linux

  4. What is Ingres? by rtos · · Score: 2, Informative
    For those of you who (like me) had vaguely heard of "Ingres" but had no idea what it really is, let me save you trouble of Googling.

    Quoth the ever-helpful Wikipedia:

    " Ingres was an early relational database system, created as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley starting in the early 1970s and ending in the early 1980s. The code, like that from other projects at Berkeley, was available at minimal cost under a version of the BSD license. Since the mid-1980s, Ingres had spawned a number of commercial database applications, including Sybase, SQL Server, NonStop SQL, Informix and a number of others. A follow-on project started in the mid-1980s as Postgres, leading to the development of PostgreSQL, Illustra, and later versions of Informix. By any measure, Ingres is one of the most influential modern computer research projects."
    So Ingres is more than just backdoors running on 1524/tcp. ;)

    Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

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  5. Ingres Vs. PostgreSQL by wackysootroom · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  6. Be careful... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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."

  7. Re:Lies, damn lies, and ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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?

    If Apache can handle Amazon's traffic they can handle anything you or anyone else can throw at it. Don't blame Apache because your management was too cheap to purchase a decent enterprise solution. Apache is used in both ma and pop web sites as well as in the enterprise... Suggesting otherwise is pure fantasy.

  8. The contest/bounty is limited, dickbrain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:can anyone tell us by james_in_denver · · Score: 2, Informative
    Well, it's been a while, but the last time I used Ingres, was to be polite, not a pleasent experience.

    Ingres had a locking scheme that positively sucked. It had a scheme were rows existed in "pages" (re, oracle's DB_BLOCK_SIZE), and these "pages" then made up tables. If any session had write locks to more than 10 "pages" it would escalate the lock to the entire table. Caused all sorts of multiuser update issues.

    Can't speak for the newer Ingres version though.

    MySQL doesn't have real transaction processing mechanisms (and yes, I know about InnoDB, that that is not GPL'ed). MySQL is very fast reading data, and it's parser is pretty darn good.

    Postgres does have transaction mechanisms very well implemented, though it is not as fast as MySQL for table reads.

    Oracle is the gold standard, does pretty much everything a DBA might need, but gold isn't free, and neither is Oracle. You will probably need more than a platinum Visa card to get a commercial license. Maybe if you threw in your house?...

    These are just my opinions.